Joe lost his elk this spring, and he was greatly disturbed by it. He had made arrangements with an old hunter, living near Fort Harker, to go out to the Saline Valley and capture another young one. He intended to break them both to harness, and expected to have a unique team to drive. The elk was so tame that he permitted it to roam at will through the woods on the margin of the Oxhide, where it browsed on the small bushes or grazed on the luxurious grass which grew in such profusion on the creek bottom. It always returned to the corral at night for its feed of corn, but one evening it failed to come up as usual. He wandered through the woods, looking for it, when, happening to come upon a camp near the mouth of the Oxhide on the trail westward, he saw to his indignation, that the emigrants, a very ignorant set from Missouri, had butchered his elk. He gave them a talking-to that was more emphatic than choice in its language. They told him they thought it was a wild one, but he became disgusted at their falsehood, and asked them if wild elks had blue ribbons on their necks as his had, and he pulled it from the hide which was lying near their wagons. The girls had sewed it on the elk for him not a week ago. He saw that the party was such a miserable set that he could do nothing with them, so he had to leave the place, as mad as a wet hen, and abandon his idea of ever having an elk team. It was a relief for the family to feel that they could now go where they pleased without fear of marauding bands of Indians. The winter campaign had most effectually settled their propensities for murdering and scalping the settlers, so both the girls and boys made trips to the neighbors, and went on fishing excursions, or hunted whenever they cared to. Even the wolves, which had been such a terror to the whole neighborhood, had been so successfully thinned out in several "surrounds" by the men living on the various creeks, that the raspberry patch was no longer infested by them. Kate and her sister went up there one morning, not expecting, of course, that the berries would be ripe as early as April. As neither of them had visited the place since Kate's capture, and everything was now perfectly safe, they thought they would like to go there again. When they arrived at the well-remembered ledge of rocks, Kate pointed out to Gertrude the exact spot where she was standing when the savages swooped down on her; and they climbed to the top where they were attacked by the wolf.