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.

So he said nothing of it. And years later he built his ranch house on the mountain side, by the spring where the last stand had been taken.

A long time after, he told a few, only a few, and they with admonitions of secrecy. Secrecy because the story of the battle of Sixty-six mountain, if generally bandied about, would lead someone to doubt his integrity or his sanity. But Ed. Stemler is both sane and honest, and the story will not harm him now. For over forty years he has lived on the 66, sometime on one slope of the mountain and sometimes on the other, but always with the wraiths of the 66 emigrants that faded out of the world over a half century ago.

He has his thousands of acres, and his thousand cattle, but sometimes at night, the moonlight calls out images from the rocks -- images of the long ago -- and the shadows flee and flit from shelter to shelter, spectrals fighting a battle in silence, a battle which years ago involved tumult and noise. The "nieht herd is