This unexpected denouement, for there had been no intention of murder, for a moment disconcerted the outlaw, and in the moment the father and the girl escaped, but were separated in the night. The story tells of their wandering up through the valley of the Nortn Platte, and to the Horse creek caves. Then on through the Rocky Gap, where their persecutor chased the "Prairie Rose," as the heroine was called, until she fell over a cliff and made a footprint in the soft clay, that "after hardened into stone and left distinct the footprint there."

During the building of the Cheyenne and Northern. I was working in one of the camps, near the head of Chugwater, and one Sunday two of us boys scaled some very difficult rocks in the Rocky Gap, and we found the footprint which is part of the foundation of the story. The track was that of about number four size woman's or child's bare foot, and it was impressed fully an inch in what had become soft rock, during the lapse of years.

The girl's sweetheart was temporarily away from the lodge on the Medicine, and when he returned he found the cabin in ruins, and all had departed, including the woman. Of course he knew nothing of their fate, nor that the woman had been hit by a tomahawk, and had wandered away "a crazy woman."

Some instinct sent him on into the west, and there is quite a long story of it, and of how he witnessed from a distance the Custer Massacre.