I ran my tunnel, or rather burrow, as it was small and low, a little too much east, and missed the haystack by about three feet, but I probed for it with a long, stiff wire and soon found it. I carried in a hay-knife and cut me out a little room like an Esquimau's house, high enough to sit in and wide and long enough so that I could stretch out comfortably in it. The hay had been wet and was frozen, so there was no danger of its caving down on me. As the stack was all covered with snow no wind could get in, and I knew it would always be warm enough to be comfortable with plenty of clothes and blankets. I took in a buffalo-robe and some things of that sort and left them there. I also cached a box of food there, consisting of dried beef, crackers, and such things; enough, I calculated, to last three days. I could hardly tell what to do about water, but at last tried the plan of chopping ice into small pieces and putting them into some of Mrs. Sours's empty glass fruit-jars. My notion was that in case I was imprisoned there I could button a can inside of my coat and thus thaw enough of the ice to get a drink. I was very well pleased with what I called my fire stronghold. I could enter from a hidden place in the barn, and could get into the barn through the tunnel from the hotel, which connected with the whole tunnel system. I knew if every house in town burned that it would not melt the snow around the stronghold; and I thought if I were in it when the barn burned I could push down the snow where it melted along the tunnel so that it would not be noticed. In short I was so tickled over my Esquimau house that I took Kaiser the first night it was done and slept in it; and though it was one of the coldest nights we were comfortable. I heard the wolves sniffing about on the roof, but we were getting used to wolves. I didn't know that we were going to have to sleep under snow again before spring; and in less comfortable quarters. CHAPTER XVI Telling of how Pike and his Gang come and of what Kaiser and I do to get ready for them: together with the Way we meet them. Here, now, I must tell of how the outlaws came to Track's End, and of the fight we, that is to say, Pike and his gang on the one side and I, Judson Pitcher, on the other side, had that day. I may speak in prejudice, though I mean to be fair, when I say that I believe them to have been as bad a gang of cutthroats as you could well scare up. Though I fought them all as best I could I make no bones of saying that I should ten thousand times rather have been at home blowing the bellows, or doing anything else. I was very lucky with these villains and was not caught away from home flat on my back, as I had been by those other scoundrels, the Indians; if I had not been lucky I should not now be here to tell the tale. Those fellows meant no good to me nor to anybody else. It would have been no bad thing if they could all have been hanged by the neck.