“Fools!” remarked Henry Chatillon, “to ride that way on the prairie; Pawnee find them—­then they catch it!”

Pawnee had found them, and they had come very near “catching it”; indeed, nothing saved them from trouble but the approach of our party.  Shaw and I knew one of them; a man named Turner, whom we had seen at Westport.  He and his companion belonged to an emigrant party encamped a few miles in advance, and had returned to look for some stray oxen, leaving their rifles, with characteristic rashness or ignorance behind them.  Their neglect had nearly cost them dear; for just before we came up, half a dozen Indians approached, and seeing them apparently defenseless, one of the rascals seized the bridle of Turner’s fine horse, and ordered him to dismount.  Turner was wholly unarmed; but the other jerked a little revolving pistol out of his pocket, at which the Pawnee recoiled; and just then some of our men appearing in the distance, the whole party whipped their rugged little horses, and made off.  In no way daunted, Turner foolishly persisted in going forward.

Long after leaving him, and late this afternoon, in the midst of a gloomy and barren prairie, we came suddenly upon the great Pawnee trail, leading from their villages on the Platte to their war and hunting grounds to the southward.  Here every summer pass the motley concourse; thousands of savages, men, women, and children, horses and mules, laden with their weapons and implements, and an innumerable multitude of unruly wolfish dogs, who have not acquired the civilized accomplishment of barking, but howl like their wild cousins of the prairie.

The permanent winter villages of the Pawnees stand on the lower Platte, but throughout the summer the greater part of the inhabitants are wandering over the plains, a treacherous cowardly banditti, who by a thousand acts of pillage and murder have deserved summary chastisement at the hands of government.  Last year a Dakota warrior performed a signal exploit at one of these villages.  He approached it alone in the middle of a dark night, and clambering up the outside of one of the lodges which are in the form of a half-sphere, he looked in at the round hole made at the top for the escape of smoke.  The dusky light from the smoldering embers showed him the forms of the sleeping inmates; and dropping lightly through the opening, he unsheathed his knife, and stirring the fire coolly selected his victims.  One by one he stabbed and scalped them, when a child suddenly awoke and screamed.  He rushed from the lodge, yelled a Sioux war-cry, shouted his name in triumph and defiance, and in a moment had darted out upon the dark prairie, leaving the whole village behind him in a tumult, with the howling and baying of dogs, the screams of women and the yells of the enraged warriors.

Our friend Kearsley, as we learned on rejoining him, signalized himself by a less bloody achievement.  He and his men were good woodsmen, and well skilled in the use of the rifle, but found themselves wholly out of their element on the prairie.  None of them had ever seen a buffalo and they had very vague conceptions of his nature and appearance.  On the day after they reached the Platte, looking toward a distant swell, they beheld a multitude of little black specks in motion upon its surface.