beyond, and it runs, as we afterward found, at the bottom of a deep trench.  We approached by riding along the bottom of a ravine.  When we were near enough, I held the horses while Henry crept toward the buffalo.  I saw him take his seat within shooting distance, prepare his rifle, and look about to select his victim.  The death of a fat cow was certain, when suddenly a great smoke arose from the bed of the Creek with a rattling volley of musketry.  A score of long-legged Missourians leaped out from among the trees and ran after the buffalo, who one and all took to their heels and vanished.  These fellows had crawled up the bed of the Creek to within a hundred yards of the buffalo.  Never was there a fairer chance for a shot.  They were good marksmen; all cracked away at once, and yet not a buffalo fell.  In fact, the animal is so tenacious of life that it requires no little knowledge of anatomy to kill it, and it is very seldom that a novice succeeds in his first attempt at approaching.  The balked Missourians were excessively mortified, especially when Henry told them if they had kept quiet he would have killed meat enough in ten minutes to feed their whole party.  Our friends, who were at no great distance, hearing such a formidable fusillade, thought the Indians had fired the volley for our benefit.  Shaw came galloping on to reconnoiter and learn if we were yet in the land of the living.

At Cow Creek we found the very welcome novelty of ripe grapes and plums, which grew there in abundance.  At the Little Arkansas, not much farther on, we saw the last buffalo, a miserable old bull, roaming over the prairie alone and melancholy.

From this time forward the character of the country was changing every day.  We had left behind us the great arid deserts, meagerly covered by the tufted buffalo grass, with its pale green hue, and its short shriveled blades.  The plains before us were carpeted with rich and verdant herbage sprinkled with flowers.  In place of buffalo we found plenty of prairie hens, and we bagged them by dozens without leaving the trail.  In three or four days we saw before us the broad woods and the emerald meadows of Council Grove, a scene of striking luxuriance and beauty.  It seemed like a new sensation as we rode beneath the resounding archs of these noble woods.  The trees were ash, oak, elm, maple, and hickory, their mighty limbs deeply overshadowing the path, while enormous grape vines were entwined among them, purple with fruit.  The shouts of our scattered party, and now and then a report of a rifle, rang amid the breathing stillness of the forest.  We rode forth again with regret into the broad light of the open prairie.  Little more than a hundred miles now separated us from the frontier settlements.  The whole intervening country was a succession of verdant prairies, rising in broad swells and relieved by trees clustering like an oasis around some spring, or following the course of a stream along some fertile hollow.  These are the prairies