Our encampment that afternoon was not far distant from a spur of the Black Hills, whose ridges, bristling with fir trees, rose from the plains a mile or two on our right.  That they might move more rapidly toward their proposed hunting-grounds, the Indians determined to leave at this place their stock of dried meat and other superfluous articles.  Some left even their lodges, and contented themselves with carrying a few hides to make a shelter from the sun and rain.  Half the inhabitants set out in the afternoon, with loaded pack horses, toward the mountains.  Here they suspended the dried meat upon trees, where the wolves and grizzly bears could not get at it.  All returned at evening.  Some of the young men declared that they had heard the reports of guns among the mountains to the eastward, and many surmises were thrown out as to the origin of these sounds.  For my part, I was in hopes that Shaw and Henry Chatillon were coming to join us.  I would have welcomed them cordially, for I had no other companions than two brutish white men and five hundred savages.  I little suspected that at that very moment my unlucky comrade was lying on a buffalo robe at Fort Laramie, fevered with ivy poison, and solacing his woes with tobacco and Shakespeare.

As we moved over the plains on the next morning, several young men were riding about the country as scouts; and at length we began to see them occasionally on the tops of the hills, shaking their robes as a signal that they saw buffalo.  Soon after, some bulls came in sight.  Horsemen darted away in pursuit, and we could see from the distance that one or two of the buffalo were killed.  Raymond suddenly became inspired.  I looked at him as he rode by my side; his face had actually grown intelligent!

“This is the country for me!” he said; “if I could only carry the buffalo that are killed here every month down to St. Louis I’d make my fortune in one winter.  I’d grow as rich as old Papin, or Mackenzie either.  I call this the poor man’s market.  When I’m hungry I have only got to take my rifle and go out and get better meat than the rich folks down below can get with all their money.  You won’t catch me living in St. Louis another winter.”

“No,” said Reynal, “you had better say that after you and your Spanish woman almost starved to death there.  What a fool you were ever to take her to the settlements.”

“Your Spanish woman?” said I; “I never heard of her before.  Are you married to her?”

“No,” answered Raymond, again looking intelligent; “the priests don’t marry their women, and why should I marry mine?”

This honorable mention of the Mexican clergy introduced the subject of religion, and I found that my two associates, in common with other white men in the country, were as indifferent to their future welfare as men whose lives are in constant peril are apt to be.  Raymond had never heard of the Pope.  A certain bishop, who lived at Taos or at Santa Fe, embodied his loftiest idea of an ecclesiastical dignitary.  Reynal observed that a priest had been at Fort Laramie two years ago, on his way to the Nez Perce mission, and that he had confessed all the men there and given them absolution.  “I got a good clearing out myself that time,” said Reynal, “and I reckon that will do for me till I go down to the settlements again.”