I would lie there, day after day, a prey to all sorts of dark imaginings.  I fancied him killed by Indians on the trail, or snowbound and starving on the Plains.  Each morning my notches on my calendar stick were made.  Gradually their number grew till at last the twentieth was duly cut.  But no Harrington came.

The wolves, smelling meat within, had now begun to gather round in increasing numbers.  They made the night hideous with their howlings, and pawed and scratched and dug at the snow by the doorway, determined to come in and make a meal of everything the dugout contained, myself included.

How I endured it I do not know.  But the Plains teach men and boys fortitude.  Many and many a time as I lay there I resolved that if I should ever be spared to go back to my home and friends, the frontier should know me no more.

It was on the twenty-ninth day, as marked on stick, when I had about given up hope, that I heard a cheerful voice shouting “Whoa!” and recognized it as the voice of Harrington.  A criminal on the scafford with the noose about his neck and the trap sagging underneath his feet could not have welcomed a pardon more eagerly than I welcomed my deliverance out of this torture-chamber.

I could make no effort to open the door for him.  But I found voice to answer him when he cried “Hello, Billy!” and in response to his question assured him that I was all right.  He soon cleared a passageway through the snow, and stood beside me.

“I never expected to see you alive again,” he said; “I had a terrible trip.  I didn’t think I should ever get through—­caught in the snowstorm and laid up for three days.  The cattle wandered away and I came within an ace of losing them altogether.  When I got started again the snow was so deep I couldn’t make much headway.”

“Well, you’re here,” I said, giving him a hug.

Harrington had made a trip few men could have made.  He had risked his life to save mine.  All alone he had brought a yoke of oxen over a country where the trails were all obscured and the blinding snow made every added mile more perilous.

I was still unable to walk, and he had to do all the work of packing up for the trip home.  In a few days he had loaded the pelts on board the wagon, covered it with the wagon-sheet we had used in the dugout, and made me a comfortable bed inside.  We had three hundred beaver and one hundred otter skins to show for our work.  That meant a lot of money when we should get them to the settlements.

On the eighth day of the journey home we reached a ranch on the Republican River, where we rested for a couple of days.  Then we went on to the ranch where Harrington had obtained his cattle and paid for the yoke with twenty-five beaver skins, the equivalent of a hundred dollars in money.

At the end of twenty days’ travel we reached Salt Creek Valley, where I was welcomed by my mother and sisters as one returned from the dead.