Where Goose Creek breaks through the sand-hills the country is flat, and, when swollen with spring rains, the stream itself has the force and fury of a mountain river. Then summer comes; the rain clouds hang no longer over the Black Hills, continuing sunshine parches the face of the great plains, and the rushing and turbulent Goose Creek ignominiously evaporates--either ascending to the skies in vapor or burrowing obscurely under the sprawling sands that lie within its course. Only stagnant pools and feeble rivulets running in widely separated channels--hiding under osiers or lurking within shady stretches of a friendly bank--remain to show where in April the noisy Goose engulfs everything within reach of its foaming wings. The creek bed becomes in midsummer a mere sandy ford that may be crossed by a child--a dry map that prints the running feet of snipe and plover, the creeping tread of the mink and the muskrat, and the slouching trail of the coyote and the wolf. Yet there is treachery in the Goose even in its apparent repose, and the unwary emigrant sometimes comes to grief upon its treacherous bed. The sands of the Goose have swallowed up more than one heedless buffalo, and the Indian knows them too well to trust them at all. When the railroad bridge was put across the creek, the difficulties of securing it were very considerable and Brodie, the chief engineer, was in the end forced to rely upon temporary foundations. Trainmen and engineers for months carried "slow" orders for Goose Creek bridge, and Bucks grew weary with warnings from the despatchers to careless enginemen about crossing it. Among the worst offenders in running his engine too fast over Goose Creek bridge was Dan Baggs, who, breathing fire through his bristling red whiskers and flashing it from his watery blue eyes, feared nobody but Indians, and obeyed reluctantly everybody connected with the railroad. Moreover, he never hesitated to announce that when "they didn't like the way he ran his engine they could get somebody else to run it." Baggs's great failing was that, while he often ran his train too fast, he wasted so much time at stations that he was always late. And it was said of him that the only instance in which he ever reached the end of his division on time was the day he ran away from Iron Hand's band of Sioux at Goose Creek--on that occasion he had made, without a doubt, a record run.