Nevertheless, at last, Bill Williams failed to come to St. Louis or Santa Fe with the well-known pack; and, as year after year passed, the old hunters would sadly shake their frosting brows and feelingly mutter, "Old Billy's gone up, sure! 'Tell 'ee for a true thing, they've rubbed out the old marksman. See! H'yar goes for a sign on my stock; I've a bullet for the nigger that sent him under, mind that!"

At length the mountains yielded up the mystery in part. Bill Williams' squaw, penetrating snow filled gorges where, assuredly, no woman had ever stepped, came into a glade where a skeleton of a horse gleamed yellow like old alabaster in the icy crust. In a snowbank, half fallen open like a split nut, was visible a kind of human figure, mummified by dry cold. It was the veteran trapper. He was in the position of a hunter awaiting a prowling foe ambushed in the shrub, his rifle in advance, his shrunken face still leaning out eagerly. In the leather shirt and breast, almost as tanned with sun and wind, was a bullet's wound: the squaw could even chisel it out of the frozen flesh, where blood had long since ceased to flow. That was the only clue to the tracker and slayer of the trapper, and that was the single token and heritage which altered the entire course of young Williams' life. School and cities saw him no more; he took to the wilds, and lived on the warpath as far as the still unpunished murderer of his father was concerned.

He was rich, like Jim Ridge, for they had penetrated the very "mother pocket" of the Rocky Mountains' gold store; but he, no more than his pure white partner, would renounce the existence of peril, but also of independence.

Suddenly a deep "Hugh!" of attention from Cherokee Bill attracted the white man's ear.

"What?" said he, peering around, but seeing nothing to alarm him; nor had the animals, usually acute observers, perceived anything even novel.

"A solitary man," answered Bill, who spoke good English, of course.

Ridge shook his head, not in doubt of his comrade's ability, but in self-blame.

On the highlands, nothing but long habit endows one with the power to calculate distances exactly. Rarefaction gives the atmosphere a clearness which seems to bring the horizon to hand—the sight is extended indefinitely, and masses of shadows in vast valleys look like mere specks in the expanses of light, so that the space between the standpoint and a distant object is usually mistaken. There are also fantastic effects from the vapour being frozen or 

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