By The Late Ena Lancaster

In Belle Fourche, rainy day talk (over 20 years ago) came around to the report that no sheepherder would camp near the big gravel pit north on 85. I treated ``Old Kentuck`` who trails sheep out to the Indian Creek ranches. He wouldn`t say much, but after evading the issue awhile, he looked at me owlishly and said:

``Well, I camped there once, but I didn`t like to hear that crying woman. I saw something move in the night and I heard that crying. Old Shep growled and crawled under the wagon. Little Joe was with me and he said it was some kind of a varmint--but it sounded like a woman to me,`` and half defiantly, ``I`d like to know what they did with those two graves that were on that hill.`` I told him I would find out.

Riding by, I stopped to have coffee with Portia, that wise and kindly lady who lives on the big cattle ranch a few miles beyond the gravel pit. I asked her, ``What do you know about graves and a weeping ghost at the gravel pit?``

``Strange that you should ask me,`` she replied. ``I don`t know about any ghosts, but I am almost the only person now living who knows about those graves. They were there, surrounded by a rickety picket fence when we came here years ago. I did worry about them when the site was selected for a gravel pit. I asked Oscar, my pioneer neighbor, what he knew of them.`` Oscar told her that one grave was that of a 12-year-old boy who died suddenly of pneumonia as the family camped beside a swollen stream. They were returning to Camp Crook from Minnesela with supplies, before Belle Fourche was founded. The roads were almost impassable. The miles were long. The family sadly buried him by the roadside. ``Oscar knew the name,`` said Portia, ``so I wrote to surviving relatives. They came and had the decaying rough box reburied in a family lot.``

Oscar doubted if he knew the true name of the infant buried in the other grave.

Sometime in the early eighties, he had given the shelter of his bunkhouse to a young couple who rode in on horseback, dusty and tired. The frail wife carried in her shawl a puny baby. The man said, ``I wanted to get Rita to her folks, but we had bad luck. If we can stay awhile, I`ll be glad to work.``

Oscar gave them grub and had the man help with haying. After two weeks, the girls big dark eyes were not so frightened and the baby slept instead of crying.

The man was tight-lipped and kept out of sight if anyone came by.

A dark night brought three grim men. ``We don`t want to bother you, Oscar, but we`ve come for your hired man. He is one of that Axelby gang of horse thieves.``

Oscar told them of the woman and child, but they were sworn to get the man. As they rode toward the shack, rifle fire blazed. They retreated, hating to shoot with the family there and sent Oscar with a demand for surrender. Finally a white cloth moved in the doorway. They approached cautiously and entered. The man was gone. Rita had covered his escape with the gun. Now, she crouched in a corner, clasping her crying baby. The men scattered, searching the draws. Oscar returned to bed. He arose as the sky lightened in the east. In the half light, he could see a figure on horseback, leading a second horse, just disappearing down the dry creek bed.

Going to the bunkhouse, he found the body of the infant, covered up in the bed. He said he could not know if Rita, hiding in fright, had smothered the child accidentally--or in desperation had taken the only way to help her husband.

Oscar`s wife was away. He looked through her things and found a wide white ribbon. He swathed the tiny body in that, put it in a little box. He and one member of the posse who had returned dug a grave beside that of the small boy. Later, he erected the fence.

He never heard more of the fleeing horse thief.

``Several years ago,`` said Portia, ``the head man of the gravel crew carefully moved the little bones to another hilltop. The box had moldered to dust, but there was still the ribbons around the little skull and skeleton. He put stakes around the grave and marked it as well as he could.`` Still, the cars rush by, and, if there is weeping, no one hears.

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