I ran back to the hotel and began shooting once more at the depot. They never fired another shot. I went over to the bank and from the back window I could see them going away to the southwest, keeping under cover of the tank and coal-shed. They came around up on to the grade a half-mile to the west. I had a look at them through the glass. Some were walking and some riding. There seemed to be two men on one horse. I think that more than one of them was wounded, but the drifting snow now made it hard to see. I went back through the hotel and down the street to watch them from the tower above the snow. The pony which had fallen into the tunnel was still there. I noticed it wore an expensive Mexican saddle, all heavy embossed leather, with a high cantle, silver ornaments, big tapaderos on the stirrups, and a horsehair 170 bridle with silver bit. There was a red blanket rolled up and tied on behind the saddle.
As I went by Townsend’s I saw that the window I wanted to get to was as full of holes as a skimmer, and I was glad the horse had blocked up my way. I noticed that the depot wasn’t much better off, however, for holes. I went up the tower and watched the outlaws for half an hour. They stopped a few minutes at Mountain’s to get their extra horses and then went on.
The wind was coming fresher all the time and I was pretty well chilled when I got down. I was hurrying along across the drifts to the hotel when I noticed the horse in the tunnel again. But his fine saddle and bridle were gone. I knew instantly that it must be the work of my unknown night visitor, who had not stolen anything for some time. This was the first thing that had been disturbed by daylight; it was growing bolder. My heart had behaved itself so well during the fight that I had forgotten that I had such a thing; now it started to thumping so hard that I thought it was all there was to me.
CHAPTER XVIII
After the Fight: also a true Account of the great Blizzard: with how I go to sleep in the Stronghold and am awakened before Morning.
So that is the true history of the fight, just as it all happened at Track’s End, Territory of Dakota, on Saturday, February 5th; and thus, through good luck and being well intrenched behind my fortifications, and having plenty of Winchesters, I beat off the cutthroat outlaws and held the town. If they had waited one day longer for their coming they would have waited a good while longer; for the next day there came such a blizzard as I had never seen before nor since, which roared without ceasing six days, lacking twelve hours; and for two weeks more the weather stayed bad, and seemed to have relapses, as they say of a person sick. No robbers could have come through it, but the ones that had come got back to their headquarters through the first of it, as I have good reason to know. 172
And for almost six weeks after the fight I lived regularly and without much disturbance, with Kaiser and the other animals for company by day and the howling of the wolves and my own thoughts by night. If the thoughts had given me no more trouble than the wolves I should have been happy, for I think I had got so that I could not sleep unless there was a wolf howling somewhere about in the neighborhood. The loneliness, the dread of the outlaws coming back, the mystery of what or who was in or near the wretched town besides myself, all kept with me and made me wish ten thousand times that I had never heard of the place, or of any place except home.
Though of course I did not keep so miserable all the while. There was plenty of work to be done, and I kept at it most of the time. My eye soon got well. The day after I beat off the outlaws and had a little recovered from the work and strain of that and of the strange start the disappearance of the saddle gave me, I found so many things waiting to be done that I scarce knew what to turn my hand to first. But I had thought the poor pony in the tunnel deserved to be got out before anything 173 else was done; and this I attended to an hour after the robbers had gone. I went out half expecting to find it gone, too, with its saddle; but it was not.