At reveille we all started up.  It was 4-1/2 A.M.  Had we slept?  We knew not.  All had been blankets and—­blank.  A pail of water and a tin basin, a little “Colgate” for cosmetic, on went the warm flannels, and we were ready by five o’clock for breakfast in the dining-tent.  Here we had camp-stools and tables, and upon the latter coffee, beef-steaks, fried potatoes, preserves and olives.  Though all our meals had to be very much alike, they were always excellent and did credit to the commissariat.  As Carlyle remarks, “Honor be to the man who cans!  He is Canning, Koenig, or King!” How people lived here before the days of canned vegetables it is hard to imagine.  Before six we were packed and off again.  The morning ride in the cool invigorating air, before the heat of the day came on, was the most delightful of our experiences.

Winding first through a pass between hills of sandstone and rubble, where moss-agates are found (an excellent place for an ambush), we followed the same sort of country as before over a succession of small creeks and divides.  These table-lands were always barren, and covered with the same thin gray vegetation, but sometimes adorned with a few flowers—­the beautiful agemone or prickly poppy, with its blue-green leaves, large white petals and crown of golden stamens; the pretty fragrant abronia, and the white oenothera.  A deep pink convolvulus was common, which grew upon a bush, not on a vine, and was a large and thrifty plant.  Sage and wormwood were seen everywhere, and on the streams we found larkspur, aconite, little white daisies and lungwort, lupines and the ever-present sunflower.  But usually all was barren—­barren hills, barren valleys, barren plains.  Sometimes we came upon tracts of buffalo-grass, a thin, low, wiry grass that grows in small tufts, and does not look as if there were any nourishment in it, but is said to be more fattening than corn.  Our animals ate it with avidity.  Was not all this dreary waste wearily monotonous and tame?  Monotonous, yes; but no more tame than the sea is tame.  We sailed along day after day over the land-waves as on a voyage.  To ride over those lonely divides in the fresh morning air made us feel as if we had breakfasted on flying-fish.  We felt what Shelley sings of the power of “all waste and solitary places;” we felt their boundlessness, their freedom, their wild flavor; we were penetrated with their solemn beauty.  Here the eyesight is clearer, the mind is brighter, the observation is quickened:  every animal, insect and bird makes its distinct impression, every object its mark.  There is something on the Plains that cannot be found elsewhere—­something which can be felt better than described—­something you must go there to find.

Under the superb blue sky we went on and on, over a country all tops and bottoms, some of the bottoms with wet creeks, most of them with dry.  We lunched at a pretty creek, a wet one, called La Bonte (it is charming to find the soft French and Spanish names so common here), a pleasant timbered stream, and a great place for Indian massacres.  The ruins of the ranches once standing in this valley are still to be seen, and the graves of a lieutenant and twenty-four soldiers killed by the Indians many years ago.