“Dear bereaved and sorrowing daddie!” sighed Jean, as she closed the book. “I cannot write a word to-night. Sacred to him and his be the page on which he has inscribed these echoes of his heart. But let nobody say, after this, that daddie has no sentiment in his make-up. The trouble is that he is too busy a man to give rein to his feelings, except under extraordinary pressure. I wish he hadn’t tried to throw away those heirlooms of mother’s, though. The oxen wouldn’t have felt the difference in the load. It was an act that he’ll be ashamed of some day.” Weeks after, when the memory-hallowed relics came to light, Captain Ranger bowed his head upon his hands and gave way to such a convulsion of grief as had not shaken him, even at the time of her transition. Jean had good cause to recall the stanzas he had inscribed to her mother’s memory in her battered journal, as she said to herself: “I knew all the time that daddie’s heart was right. It is only necessary to touch it in the proper place to show that it is tender.” Once more she closed the book without having written a word. But we must not anticipate. On the 22d of June another entry is recorded,—Jean’s last memorandum of their journey in the Black Hills: “The prickly pears still give us much annoyance. The roads are heavy with sand, and the rocks over which our wagons must bump and bound are terribly rough and jagged. “Across the Platte, and away to the southward many miles, though they seem much nearer, owing to the rarity of the air, are quaint and curious formations in the rocky cliffs, worn by the winds of ages into rude images of men and animals that stare at us with sunken eyes, their broken noses, grinning skulls, and disfigured bodies reminding us of unhappy phantoms risen from the under world. “Sometimes the semblance of a great mosque or cathedral rears its domes and minarets in the clear blue of the heavens; and sometimes what seems a great embattled fortification is seen rising with realistic majesty from a vast sage plain that looks, with a little aid of the imagination, like the dried-up bed of a big moat. Of course, ‘’tis distance lends enchantment to the view,’ as no doubt the images we see so distinctly would resolve themselves into shapeless masses if we could see them at close range. “The grass we so much need for the stock has again disappeared, and daddie says we shall return to-morrow to the main travelled road. Wild flowers are blooming in profusion all around our camp, smiling at us as if in mockery of the prevailing desolation. Wood is scarce again, and we find few buffalo chips. “We seldom see any more deer or antelope, and the buffalo have all escaped to the distant hills; that is, all but the hapless multitudes that have been cruelly and needlessly slaughtered by the unthinking and greedy hunters of the plains.