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.
The mad mother in the course of her wanderings came to the valley of the Big Beard, and here she lived for a year or more, subsisting on roots and berries and bark. Mere the father found her. and while she several times rushed away and hid at his approach as she did when strangers appeared, he at last caught her, and her reason returned.
The woman's living in this section changed ili< name of Big Beard to Crazy Woman.
As is the way with stories, this ended well, and the daughter was found, and then the
sweetheart, and also came the knowledge that their persecutor was dead. They then lived for a time in a huge sod cabin, some distance west of the Big Horn range in Wyoming, but later left their happy mountain domicile for the old home in Ohio.
"Sometimes when Lillie musing sits, A dreamy mist before her flits, And to her waking memories come Fair visions of a mountain home. And all her gilded marble halls Become transformed to sodded walls, Her frescoed ceilings fade away To rough hewn poles and boughs and hay.