It was on the very day that I had said to Kaiser and Pawsy at breakfast (that is, January 25th) that it was a month since I had seen any human being, that I was at the depot after a load of ground feed, and in looking to the northwest thought I saw something moving. It did not take me long to go up the windmill tower. It was not past ten o'clock in the forenoon, so the light for looking toward the northwest was good, though of course, as the sun was shining, the snow was pretty dazzling. But I could still only make out that something was moving south or southwest. It was impossible to tell if it were men or horses or cattle. So I went down as fast as I could, jumped onto the sled, and the next minute Kaiser had me at the hotel, where I got the field-glass and went back. Up the tower I scrambled for another look. The snow was so dazzling that the glass did less good than you might suppose, but with it I could soon tell that it was a party of men on horseback following either another party or a drove of cattle or horses. The band ahead swung gradually about and came toward Track's End. The ones behind seemed to be trying to cut them off, but they failed to do it. On they came, and in ten minutes I could see that it was either cattle or horses that were being chased by twenty or twenty-five men on horseback. The cattle were following a low, broad ridge where the snow was less deep, and which spread out west of the town, making less snow there also, as I have mentioned before. I thought there was something peculiar about the riding of the men; I watched closely, and then I saw they were Indians. My first thought was that it was daylight and no jack-lantern would scare them away. I saw I must depend on harsher measures. In almost no time I had got over town, locked the barn, shut Kaiser in the hotel, run through my tunnel to the bank so as to be on the west side of town, and stood peeping out a loophole with two fully loaded Winchesters on a table beside me. CHAPTER XIV I have an exciting Hunt and get some Game, which I bring Home with a vast deal of Labor, only to lose Part of it in a startling Manner: together with a Dream and an Awakening. I had not had my eyes to the loophole ten seconds when I found out something more about the coming invaders; what I had taken for cattle were buffaloes, a thing which surprised me very much, for they were even then extremely scarce. There were about a dozen of them, and they were coming on all in a bunch and throwing up the snow like a locomotive.