At our encampment that afternoon I was attacked anew by my old disorder.  In half an hour the strength that I had been gaining for a week past had vanished again, and I became like a man in a dream.  But at sunset I lay down in the Big Crow’s lodge and slept, totally unconscious till the morning.  The first thing that awakened me was a hoarse flapping over my head, and a sudden light that poured in upon me.  The camp was breaking up, and the squaws were moving the covering from the lodge.  I arose and shook off my blanket with the feeling of perfect health; but scarcely had I gained my feet when a sense of my helpless condition was once more forced upon me, and I found myself scarcely able to stand.  Raymond had brought up Pauline and the mule, and I stooped to raise my saddle from the ground.  My strength was quite inadequate to the task.  “You must saddle her,” said I to Raymond, as I sat down again on a pile of buffalo robes: 

“Et hoec etiam fortasse meminisse juvabit.”

I thought, while with a painful effort I raised myself into the saddle.  Half an hour after, even the expectation that Virgil’s line expressed seemed destined to disappointment.  As we were passing over a great plain, surrounded by long broken ridges, I rode slowly in advance of the Indians, with thoughts that wandered far from the time and from the place.  Suddenly the sky darkened, and thunder began to mutter.  Clouds were rising over the hills, as dreary and dull as the first forebodings of an approaching calamity; and in a moment all around was wrapped in shadow.  I looked behind.  The Indians had stopped to prepare for the approaching storm, and the dark, dense mass of savages stretched far to the right and left.  Since the first attack of my disorder the effects of rain upon me had usually been injurious in the extreme.  I had no strength to spare, having at that moment scarcely enough to keep my seat on horseback.  Then, for the first time, it pressed upon me as a strong probability that I might never leave those deserts.  “Well,” thought I to myself, “a prairie makes quick and sharp work.  Better to die here, in the saddle to the last, than to stifle in the hot air of a sick chamber, and a thousand times better than to drag out life, as many have done, in the helpless inaction of lingering disease.”  So, drawing the buffalo robe on which I sat over my head, I waited till the storm should come.  It broke at last with a sudden burst of fury, and passing away as rapidly as it came, left the sky clear again.  My reflections served me no other purpose than to look back upon as a piece of curious experience; for the rain did not produce the ill effects that I had expected.  We encamped within an hour.  Having no change of clothes, I contrived to borrow a curious kind of substitute from Reynal:  and this done, I went home, that is, to the Big Crow’s lodge to make the entire transfer that was necessary.  Half a dozen squaws were in the lodge, and one of them taking my arm held it against her own, while a general laugh and scream of admiration were raised at the contrast in the color of the skin.