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steers to the river to drink when they descried the thunderous clatter of the freight wagons drawing near. It was far too crowded, he thought. Up every creek, fork and gulch, he found the detritus of human occupation. At every stream bend, a Chinaman with a pan, dipping for gold. Furtive Indians hunted in the cottonwoods. On the four quarters, black smoke rose from the furnaces. Stages ground by like clockwork, stations for changing horses measured every fifteen miles. Teamsters thrashed their long trains up and down the roadstead, leaving a fine white dust to settle like mortuary lime. Painted signs nailed to posts marked the forks, made poetry of commerce. Dark Horse, Puzzler, Blue Wing, Polaris, Argenta, Hecla, Queen of the Hills, Pandora. Industrious avidity, he thought. Busy and inquisitive as rats, he thought. It wasn’t that he was against the making of money, but he hewed to a desperate and higher calling, a dark path bequeathed him in the cornfield at Antietam, which rendered his character contemptuous.
    He held to the high mountains on his left and presently veered away from the Wisdom River, following a tributary in a narrow, sere valley. Some distance off the trail and out of sight up a gulch that had barely been touched by placers, they discovered a cabin and pole barn and an acre cleared of everything but stumps and wildflowers, and beyond, among the sparse pines, beef cattle foraging. The owner and his wife politely took them in for the night. He shot them after dinner and stored the bodies in a convenient cold cellar made of rock slabs, chilled by a mountain spring that bubbled out of a crevice. He turned his steers loose amongst the others, and because he paid them no mind, they disappeared up or down the cold, splashy creek. Then untold days passed and he wished for that Plott hound of the prior winter, for there were bears about and he wanted to hunt. The girl unscrolled a buffalo robe and lay naked, save for boots, in the cleared field when the sun shone, turning dusky brown so her eyes smouldered and her bleached hair was like a white flame. He discovered a six-month-old newspaper from St. Louis in the cabin and read to her in bed by candlelight. Pronghorns concoursed in the cleared field in the twilight gloom ere dawn; he shot one when they needed it. A lonely prospector with a mule and a donkey, a twelve-month growth of yellow beard and no teeth to speak of stumbled upon the homestead one sunspill afternoon. He said, “That girl is like enough half Indian parading without drawers. I could do er. I could.” And then he said, “No, I ain’t a preacher, but I read the Good Book when I were a sprout and have took the pledge at camp meetin’ to go teetotal when I am not drinking.” Blam. His body went into the cold cellar with the others.
    He rode to Butte to sell stolen horses. He did not like the open country there, the buffalo prairie and the dry gulches filled with abandoned placer equipment and the scattered settlement of mean log houses, slanted frame buildings leaning together, the skeletal remains of the silver smelter, and nary a place to conceal himself. In the saloon next to Hauswirth’s Hotel on Main Street he heard how a Vigilance Committee at Last Chance Gulch had captured him twice but he had escaped both times by trickery or infernal magic. A Mormon bone collector hunting buffalo kills had spied him slaughtering a human corpse far north in the Flatheads. When he checked on the return trip, parts of the body had been chewed on. After asking nine people in that depressed and irreligious town for directions, he tracked down a placer miner name of Skloot who once had been a preacher, was an undertaker on the side and could also cure the toothache with a red-hot wire. Skloot had five children out of eighteen born and introduced a young wife Priscilla Skloot who was his second wife after the first succumbed in giving birth. “How far did yer say was yer