As we moved on the broken column grew yet more scattered and disorderly, until, as we approached the foot of a hill, I saw the old men before mentioned seating themselves in a line upon the ground, in advance of the whole.They lighted a pipe and sat smoking, laughing, and telling stories, while the people, stopping as they successively came up, were soon gathered in a crowd behind them.Then the old men rose, drew their buffalo robes over their shoulders, and strode on as before.Gaining the top of the hill, we found a very steep declivity before us.There was not a minute's pause.The whole descended in a mass, amid dust and confusion.The horses braced their feet as they slid down, women and children were screaming, dogs yelping as they were trodden upon, while stones and earth went rolling to the bottom.
In a few moments I could see the village from the summit, spreading again far and wide over the plain below.
At our encampment that afternoon I was attacked anew by my old disorder.In half an hour the strength that I had been gaining for a week past had vanished again, and I became like a man in a dream.
But at sunset I lay down in the Big Crow's lodge and slept, totally unconscious till the morning.The first thing that awakened me was a hoarse flapping over my head, and a sudden light that poured in upon me.The camp was breaking up, and the squaws were moving the covering from the lodge.I arose and shook off my blanket with the feeling of perfect health; but scarcely had I gained my feet when a sense of my helpless condition was once more forced upon me, and Ifound myself scarcely able to stand.Raymond had brought up Pauline and the mule, and I stooped to raise my saddle from the ground.My strength was quite inadequate to the task."You must saddle her,"said I to Raymond, as I sat down again on a pile of buffalo robes:
"Et hoec etiam fortasse meminisse juvabit."I thought, while with a painful effort I raised myself into the saddle.Half an hour after, even the expectation that Virgil's line expressed seemed destined to disappointment.As we were passing over a great plain, surrounded by long broken ridges, I rode slowly in advance of the Indians, with thoughts that wandered far from the time and from the place.Suddenly the sky darkened, and thunder began to mutter.Clouds were rising over the hills, as dreary and dull as the first forebodings of an approaching calamity; and in a moment all around was wrapped in shadow.I looked behind.The Indians had stopped to prepare for the approaching storm, and the dark, dense mass of savages stretched far to the right and left.Since the first attack of my disorder the effects of rain upon me had usually been injurious in the extreme.I had no strength to spare, having at that moment scarcely enough to keep my seat on horseback.Then, for the first time, it pressed upon me as a strong probability that I might never leave those deserts."Well," thought I to myself, "a prairie makes quick and sharp work.Better to die here, in the saddle to the last, than to stifle in the hot air of a sick chamber, and a thousand times better than to drag out life, as many have done, in the helpless inaction of lingering disease." So, drawing the buffalo robe on which I sat over my head, I waited till the storm should come.It broke at last with a sudden burst of fury, and passing away as rapidly as it came, left the sky clear again.My reflections served me no other purpose than to look back upon as a piece of curious experience; for the rain did not produce the ill effects that I had expected.We encamped within an hour.Having no change of clothes, I contrived to borrow a curious kind of substitute from Reynal: and this done, I went home, that is, to the Big Crow's lodge to make the entire transfer that was necessary.Half a dozen squaws were in the lodge, and one of them taking my arm held it against her own, while a general laugh and scream of admiration were raised at the contrast in the color of the skin.
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.Ilittle 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!
