"May 24. We are following the Little Blue,—a muddy stream about a hundred feet in width.
"May 25. We met to-day a long train of heavily loaded wagons coming from Fort Laramie with great mountains of buffalo robes. At this rate, the buffalo will all be killed off in a very few years. The frightened creatures are now so wild that it is next to impossible to get a shot at one of them; and the antelope are even more timid. Why is man such a destructive animal, I wonder?
"The men driving the freight-teams we met were a mixed-up lot of Indians, Spaniards, and French and Indian half-breeds. Their speech was to us an unintelligible jargon in everything but its profanity, which was English, straight. There was one white man in the crowd, or maybe two of them. They were on horseback, and kept aloof from the common herd. A peculiar apprehension overcame me as I gazed at one of these strangers. He was large, bronzed, and portly, and sat his horse like a centaur; or perhaps I should come nearer the truth if I said like an Englishman. My heart beat a strange tattoo as I watched him. Somehow, it seemed to me that he was in some way concerned with some of our company. I did not understand the feeling, but it wasn't comfortable."
"There, daddie!" she cried, exhibiting the written pages. "Don't say I 'm neglecting my journal now! "
The twilight had deepened. Below the camp ran a deep ravine, at the base of which a little brook sang merrily. Clumps of cottonwood, badly crippled by wayfarers' axes, struggled for existence here and there. In her haste to reach the covert of the bushes unobserved, Jean ran diagonally over a settlement of prairie dogs, near which the campers had inadvertently pitched their tents. The Lilliputian municipality was evidently well disciplined, for at the sound of approaching footsteps the same sharp, staccato bark, of mingled warning and
