Pontiac was exceedingly reluctant to turn back; Hendrick, too, who
had evidently flattered himself with vain hopes, showed the utmost
repugnance, and grumbled in a manner peculiar to himself at being
compelled to face about. A smart cut of the whip restored his
cheerfulness; and dragging the recovered truant behind, I set out in
search of the camp. An hour or two elapsed, when, near sunset, I saw the
tents, standing on a rich swell of the prairie, beyond a line of woods,
while the bands of horses were feeding in a low meadow close at hand.
There sat Jack C., cross-legged, in the sun, splicing a trail-rope,
and the rest were lying on the grass, smoking and telling stories. That
night we enjoyed a serenade from the wolves, more lively than any with
which they had yet favored us; and in the morning one of the musicians
appeared, not many rods from the tents, quietly seated among the horses,
looking at us with a pair of large gray eyes; but perceiving a rifle
leveled at him, he leaped up and made off in hot haste.

I pass by the following day or two of our journey, for nothing occurred
worthy of record. Should any one of my readers ever be impelled to visit
the prairies, and should he choose the route of the Platte (the best,
perhaps, that can be adopted), I can assure him that he need not
think to enter at once upon the paradise of his imagination. A dreary
preliminary, protracted crossing of the threshold awaits him before
he finds himself fairly upon the verge of the "great American desert,"
those barren wastes, the haunts of the buffalo and the Indian, where
the very shadow of civilization lies a hundred leagues behind him. The
intervening country, the wide and fertile belt that extends for
several hundred miles beyond the extreme frontier, will probably answer
tolerably well to his preconceived ideas of the prairie; for this it
is from which picturesque tourists, painters, poets, and novelists, who
have seldom penetrated farther, have derived their conceptions of the