"Well, boys," my uncle said to the men as they were starting back to work, "there's this much about it: help is sure coming to us. We'll just peg along the best we can and trust to luck that all will be well with us." Abbott was asleep, having been on guard all night. Pitamakan and I soon lay down and slept. At supper-time we got up and had a refreshing bath in the river, where Abbott joined us, and toward dusk we three went to guard the grove during the night. My uncle arranged with the engagés to stand watch in the barricade by turns, for he was completely worn out by his day-and-night work and had to have one night of complete rest. The night passed quietly; when morning came we were all convinced that Sliding Beaver's followers and survivors had gone on to their camp. Nevertheless, we did not intend to relax our vigilance. According to my uncle's plan of the fort, three hundred and ten logs, twenty feet long and a foot in diameter, were required for the walls and the roof supports, and for the two bastions ninety logs twelve feet long were required. Of that large number only a few more than a hundred had been hauled out. With our present force we could not possibly build the fort in less than three months. At Abbott's suggestion that he build upon a much smaller scale, my uncle had replied, "No, sir! This place calls for a real fort, a commodious fort. I am going to have it or none at all." On that day Pitamakan and I slept until noon and after dinner saddled Is-spai-u and my runner and rode out for meat, I, of course, upon the black. There were plenty of buffaloes in the valley not more than a mile above camp. Pitamakan and I rode down into the grove to notify my uncle to have a man follow us with a team and wagon, for we intended to make a quick killing. Sneaking through the timber close to a herd of buffaloes and chasing them across the flat, we killed four fat ones. We hurriedly butchered them and helped the engagés to load the meat upon the wagon; then we remounted our horses. Off to the south lay country unknown to me. "Come! Let us ride out upon discovery," I said to Pitamakan. "I knew that was in your mind by the way you used your knife on our kills," he replied. We rode out upon the west rim of the valley, following it to the mouth of the Sacajawea Creek, which we crossed, then again along the rim for perhaps five miles to the top of a flat butte from which we had a wonderful view of the country. Pitamakan pointed out to me where Flat Willow Creek and Box Elder Creek, at the nearest point about forty miles to the south of us, broke into the Musselshell from the Snowy Mountains. Both streams, he said, were from their mouths to their heads just one beaver pond after another. We had, of course, disturbed numerous bands of buffaloes and antelopes along our way up the rim, and now, turning down into the valley of the Musselshell on our homeward course, we alarmed more of them.