For eight hours Raymond and I, pillowed on our saddles, lay insensible as logs.  Pauline’s yellow head was stretched over me when I awoke.  I got up and examined her.  Her feet indeed were bruised and swollen by the accidents of yesterday, but her eye was brighter, her motions livelier, and her mysterious malady had visibly abated.  We moved on, hoping within an hour to come in sight of the Indian village; but again disappointment awaited us.  The trail disappeared, melting away upon a hard and stony plain.  Raymond and I separating, rode from side to side, scrutinizing every yard of ground, until at length I discerned traces of the lodge-poles passing by the side of a ridge of rocks.  We began again to follow them.

“What is that black spot out there on the prairie?”

“It looks like a dead buffalo,” answered Raymond.

We rode out to it, and found it to be the huge carcass of a bull killed by the Indians as they had passed.  Tangled hair and scraps of hide were scattered all around, for the wolves had been making merry over it, and had hollowed out the entire carcass.  It was covered with myriads of large black crickets, and from its appearance must certainly have lain there for four or five days.  The sight was a most disheartening one, and I observed to Raymond that the Indians might still be fifty or sixty miles before us.  But he shook his head, and replied that they dared not go so far for fear of their enemies, the Snakes.

Soon after this we lost the trail again, and ascended a neighboring ridge, totally at a loss.  Before us lay a plain perfectly flat, spreading on the right and left, without apparent limit, and bounded in front by a long broken line of hills, ten or twelve miles distant.  All was open and exposed to view, yet not a buffalo nor an Indian was visible.

“Do you see that?” said Raymond; “Now we had better turn round.”

But as Raymond’s bourgeois thought otherwise, we descended the hill and began to cross the plain.  We had come so far that I knew perfectly well neither Pauline’s limbs nor my own could carry me back to Fort Laramie.  I considered that the lines of expediency and inclination tallied exactly, and that the most prudent course was to keep forward.  The ground immediately around us was thickly strewn with the skulls and bones of buffalo, for here a year or two before the Indians had made a “surround”; yet no living game presented itself.  At length, however, an antelope sprang up and gazed at us.  We fired together, and by a singular fatality we both missed, although the animal stood, a fair mark, within eighty yards.  This ill success might perhaps be charged to our own eagerness, for by this time we had no provision left except a little flour.  We could discern several small lakes, or rather extensive pools of water, glistening in the distance.  As we approached them, wolves and antelopes bounded away through the tall grass that grew in their vicinity,