Making sure that he was past harming us we turned our attention to the poor bull, but he was too far gone to recover, and another bullet put him out of his misery.

We were now left without a team, and two hundred miles from home.  But wealth in the shape of pelts was accumulating about us, and we determined to stick it out till spring.  Then one of us could go to the nearest settlement for a teammate for our remaining steer, while the other stayed in charge of the camp.

This plan had to be carried out far sooner than we expected.  A few days later we espied a herd of elk, which meant plentiful and excellent meat.  We at once started in pursuit.  Creeping stealthily along toward them, keeping out of sight, and awaiting an opportunity to get a good shot, I slipped on a stone in the creek bed.

“Snap!” went something and looking down I saw my foot hanging useless.  I had broken my leg just above the ankle and my present career as a fur-trapper had ended.

I was very miserable when Harrington came up.  I urged him to shoot me as he had the ox, but he laughingly replied that that would hardly do.

“I’ll bring you out all right!” he said.  “I owe you a life anyway for saving me from that bear.  I learned a little something about surgery when I was in Illinois, and I guess I can fix you up.”

He got me back to camp after a long and painful hour and with a wagon-bow, which he made into a splint, set the fracture.  But our enterprise was at an end.  Help would have to be found now, and before spring.  One man and a cripple could never get through the winter.

It was determined that Harrington must go for this needful assistance just as soon as possible.  He placed me on our little bunk, with plenty of blankets to cover me.  All our provisions he put within my reach.  A cup was lashed to a long sapling, and Harrington made a hole in the side of the dugout so that I could reach this cup out to a snow-bank for my water supply.

Lastly he cut a great pile of wood and heaped it near the fire.  Without leaving the bunk I could thus do a little cooking, keep the fire up, and eat and sleep.  It was not a situation that I would have chosen, but there was nothing else to do.

The nearest settlement was a hundred and twenty-five miles distant.  Harrington figured that he could make the round trip in twenty days.  My supplies were ample to last that long.  I urged him to start as soon as possible, that he might the sooner return with a new yoke of oxen.  Then I could be hauled out to where medical attendance was to be had.

I watched him start off afoot, and my heart was heavy.  But soon I stopped thinking of my pain and began to find ways and means to cure my loneliness.  We had brought with us a number of books, and these I read through most of my waking hours.  But the days grew longer and longer for all that.  Every morning when I woke I cut a notch in a long stick to mark its coming.  I had cut twelve of these notches when one morning I was awakened from a sound sleep by the touch of a hand on my shoulder.