noon
From the mouth of Sage Creek to Fort Walsh it is a fraction over fifty miles , across comparatively flat country . By the time our breakfast was done we calculated it to be ten o'clock . We had the half of a long mid-summer day to make it . So , partly because we might find the full fifty miles an ash-strewn waste , fodderless , blackened , where an afternoon halt would be a dreary sojourn , and partly for the sake of the three good horses we had pushed so unmercifully through the early hours of the night , we laid on the grassy river-bottom till noon . Then we packed , placed the sullen captives in the saddle with hands lashed stoutly , mounted our horses and recrossed the river . Once on the uplands we struck the long trot -- eight hours of daylight to make fifty miles . And we made it .