They took refuge in the hills and fought long and hard. It was days before the remnant of the sixty-six were overcome near a spring on the north side of the mountain, and here it was that Ed. Stemler fell, as the others had fallen, fighting stubbornly.

There is a superstition among the Indians about red hair, atid it is said this fact is all that saved him from the shocking fate, and the scalping meted out to the others.

How long it was after the massacre that Ed. revived, he had no means of knowing, and why he set about and buried the dead, and why he went back to the herds north of Pine Bluffs, and why no report was ever made, are things which will give rise to lively speculation forever. My life and experiences on the range enable me to speculate more clearly, perhaps, than others.

After a few weeks of solitude, an adventure like this, and its miraculous finale for the one that lived, and who knew no reason why he had been spared, will make it all seem like a vagrant dream. A nightmare of the prairie, a figment that never had real substance.

Why had he left his herds? What directed him to these people, and how came they there ? Why had the Indians singled him out, and avoided dealing him the fatal injury? Surely, it must have been a dream, like, so many of the wild things he had dreamed before, out there in the solitude.