After waiting, in anxious expectation of Martin’s return, for a full hour, during which the air seemed to get more and more sultry, my companion began to wax impatient.  “What can the fellow be about?” cried he.  “Give a blast on the horn,” he added, handing me the instrument; “I cannot sound it myself, for my tongue cleaves to my palate from heat and drought.”

I put the horn to my mouth, and gave a blast.  But the tones emitted were not the clear echo-awakening sounds that cheer and strengthen the hunter.  They were dull and short, as though the air had lost all elasticity and vibration, and by its weight crushed back the sounds into the horn.  It was a warning of some inscrutable danger.  We gazed around us, and saw that others were not wanting.

The spot where we had halted was on the edge of one of those pine forests that extend, almost without interruption, from the hills of the Cote Gelee to the Opelousa mountains, and of a vast prairie, sprinkled here and there with palmetto fields, clumps of trees, and broad patches of brushwood, which appeared mere dark specks on the immense extent of plain that lay before us, covered with grass of the brightest green, and so long, as to reach up to our horses’ shoulders.  To the right was a plantation of palmettos, half a mile wide, and bounded by a sort of creek or gully, the banks of which were covered with gigantic cypress-trees.  Beyond this, more prairie and a wood of evergreen oak.  To the east, an impenetrable thicket of magnolias, papaws, oak and bean trees—­to the north, the pine wood before mentioned.

Such was the rich landscape we had been surrounded by a short hour before.  But now, on looking around, we found the scene changed; and our horizon became far more limited by rising clouds of bluish grey vapour, which approached us rapidly from the wind quarter.  Each moment this fog appeared to become thicker; the sun no longer dazzled our eyes when we gazed on it, but showed through the mist like a pale red moon; the outlines of the forest disappeared, veiled from our sight by masses of vapour; and the air, which, during the morning, had been light and elastic, although hot, became each moment heavier and more difficult to inhale.  The part of the prairie that remained visible, presented the appearance of a narrow, misty valley, enclosed between two mighty ranges of grey mountains, which the fog represented.  As we gazed around us and beheld these strange phenomena, our eyes met, and we read in each others countenance that embarrassment which the bravest and most light-hearted are apt to feel, when hemmed in by perils of which they cannot conjecture the nature.

“Fire off your gun,” said I to Carleton.  I started as I spoke at the alteration in my own voice.  The gun went off, but the report was, as it were, stifled by the compressed atmosphere.  It did not even alarm some water-fowl that were plashing and floundering in the creek a few hundred paces from us.