July 5.—Didn't drink a drop yesterday. It was the quietest Fourth I ever put in. I never felt so little remorse over the way I celebrated as I do to-day. I didn't do a thing yesterday that I was ashamed of except to eat the remainder of a box of shoe blacking for supper. To-day I ate my last boot-heel, stewed. Looks as though we might have a hard winter.
July 6.—Feel a little apprehension about something to eat. My credit is all right here, but there is no competition, and prices are therefore very high. Ice, however, is still firm. This would be a good ice-cream country if there were any demand, but the country is so sparsely settled that a man feels as lonesome here as a greenbacker at a presidential election. Ate a pound of cotton waste soaked in machine oil, to-day. There is nothing left for to-morrow but ice-water and an old pocket-book for dinner. Looks as though we might have snow.
July 7.—This is a good, cool place to spend the summer if provisions were more plenty. I am wearing a seal-skin undershirt, with three woolen overshirts and two bear-skin vests, to-day, and when the dew begins to fall I have to put on my buffalo ulster to keep off the night air. I wish I was home. It seems pretty lonesome here since the other boys died. I do not know what I will get for dinner to-morrow, unless the neighbors bring in something. A big bear is coming down the hatchway as I write. I wish I could eat him. It would be the first square meal for two months. It is, however, a little mixed whether I will eat him or he eat me. It will be a cold day for me if he——
Here the diary breaks off abruptly, and from the chewed-up appearance of the book, we are led to entertain a horrible fear as to his safety.
A HAT DEPOSIT IN THE BLACK HILLS.
An old hunter was out among the Black Hills, east of town, last summer, hunting for cotton-tails and sage hens, and he ran across a little gulch where the abrupt rocks closed together and formed a little atmospheric eddy, so to speak. There in that lonely reservoir he found what he at first considered a petrified hat store. It was a genuine deposit of escaped straw hats and plug hats that the frolicsome zephyrs had caught up and carried for ten miles, until this natural hat-rack had secured them. Of course there were other articles of apparel, and some debilitated umbrellas, but the deposit seemed to assay mostly hats.