Below the Powder the river flows for some distance through an extensive belt of Bad Lands, a burnt, barren, savage-looking country with little vegetation, few streams, and miles of fantastic castles, kiosks and minarets of black and red rock. It is desolate in the extreme even when viewed from the cool current of the river, but surely in no wise so sinister and forbidding as those terrible stretches of Bad Lands between the Yellowstone and Little Missouri which grim old General Sully, after pursuing the Sioux over their scorched rocks for a season, so aptly described as "Hell-With-the-Lights-Out." Finding Terry was out of sight behind the hills, I landed about eight o'clock to make camp on a gravel bar. A grizzled old codger, across whose fish-lines I came crabbing in, seemed more pleased than put out over the diversion. He could fish twenty-four hours a day, he explained, but a man willing to be talked to wasn't the sort of a bird that came along to that neck of the river every day. So he went up to his cabin, brought down some eggs and milk, and we pooled grub and suppered together there under the cottonwoods by the river. He had hunted, trapped, prospected and searched for agates for fifty years, and it was well into the night before he had told me all about it. A confession of my old love for "Calamity Jane" broke down his reserve at the outset. He had seen a lot of the dear old girl at the very zenith of her career. He told a delicious story of how "Calamity," her paprika temperament ruffled by a dude's red necktie, had tried to make that unfortunate _eat_ the offending rag at the point of a pistol. The advice with which she had endeavoured to sauce the untoothsome morsel was rather the best part of the yarn, but it was hardly sufficiently "drawing-room" to find place in these chaste chronicles. There was a strong up-river breeze blowing when I got under way at six the next morning. When this came dead ahead it had no effect other than slowing down my progress greatly, but when the direction of the channel brought it more or less abeam I had great difficulty in keeping from being blown under the caving banks. This was, as I remember it, my first experience of what later became perhaps the most annoyingly persistent difficulty attending my progress down both the Missouri and Mississippi. After getting in trouble two or three times and having to stop to bail out and recover my wind, I gave up the fight about noon and landed at a highly picturesque old ranch twenty-five miles above Glendive. The clanging of a dinner gong was not the least pleasant sound that assailed my ears as I climbed the bank.