quered by desperation; I had made a detour of at least a mile, to get around another one, which looked absolutely untraversable; I now came to a third, with sides literally precipitous. Its walls were fifty feet high, and ran sinuously, eating about into the plain further than I could see, with numerous lateral ramifications. After several vain attempts to flank these trenches of Nature, I came back to the edge of the bluff, and considered myself. I was lost, faint, sick; my horse quite worn out, and the sun not an hour high. I was uncomfortably near the Sioux, who a few days before had taken a Colorado soldier, on a hunt from Fort Kearney and lost like myself; had robbed him of horse, ammunition, arms, all he had in the world; pulled out his beard, and left him naked as he was born, forty miles from the nearest white trapper. I made up my mind that I would descend the first practicable draw, cross the river, picket my horse, make a supper of sunflower-roots and wild onions, and camp down under my saddle-blankets, and with the returning light renew my search for our camp, along the northern and more level bank of the Republican. I was pretty sure that I could find the ford we had crossed, by hunting for our wheel-tracks. I accordingly led my horse down the nearest ramification of the great draw, and with great difficulty, for the bottom was a perfect slough, escaped from my embarrassments upon the low level of the river bank.

Before I leave this entanglement of horrors, I must not omit to say that just before descending, I shot my first antelope. He was grazing on the side of a divide, quite six hundred yards off, to the naked eye appearing only a small brown spot in the sunshine. I wanted meat so badly that I never asked myself

the question how I was going to get round to him, and pack him home. He had not seen or scented me when I lay down in the grass and poised my Ballard, which nominally put up for five hundred yards, but at that distance invariably threw the ball above, unless allowance was made for its habits. I spent as much time in calculating my aim as a boy of ten over a sum in division, and fired resting on my elbows. My brown spot went up into the air with one convulsive spring, turned a cart-wheel, and fell on his side in his tracks. The next moment I saw how impossible it was to get him, but went down the draw excusing the murder by a promise to go after him to-morrow. When that morrow came, he was a clean skeleton, picked by the wolves. Though I had not the meat, I had gained a pride and a confidence in my weapon which were everything to a man in my position, and hugged it close to my breast ere I swung it round to my back, not knowing how often it might have to save my life before I saw camp again. I had many occasions to love that rifle afterwards; and I should be ungrateful indeed, if I did not say that the Ballard breech-loader is, without a single exception, the best arm for Western work that was ever invented. In good hands, it fires seven balls a minute with perfect accuracy, having all the advantages ever practically used in a repeater; it is the simplest in its mechanism of all breech-loading weapons, and never once got out of order during a daily use of eight months. Its breech is absolutely powder-tight, through the very construction of its cartridge; this cartridge is an entire load, including percussion material, and cleans the bore in leaving it; nothing can be more portable, simpler, safer. The

man who is competent to use a rifle at all need never miss with it, and one who has made its acquaintance will never be without it in the wilderness. If this be high praise, I can only say that every expert who has seen its performance agrees with me. Over and over again in the far West, old hunters became so enamored of it as to offer me its original cost, several times told.

I was half way across the first bottom when the sun went out of sight. Simultaneously with his disappearance, the wolves seemed to be assembling for jubilee. In every quarter I could see one of either the big gray or the coyote variety. They did not seem alarmed at me, and sat up on their haunches like so many shepherd dogs, in a circle around me and poor tired Nig, making the air dismal with their discordant howls. I was not afraid of them, for they never attack a man unless mad with hunger; but their presence, worn out as I was, filled me with gloom and foreboding. They seemed like harpy old women at a country funeral, crowding around to get a last look at the corpse. Moreover, they might attack my picketed horse in force during the night; and personal affection for him after my trial of his intelligent faithfulness, to say nothing of my own loneliness if he were killed, made me very anxious not to lose him.

Despite the depression begotten of the wolves, my spirits had still to touch their zero point. Crossing the river bottom about a hundred rods from me, I presently saw a man, coatless, hatless, and, to my field-glass, of a rich-brown complexion, black-haired, and carrying a gun. So this was the meaning of the deserted Sioux camp on the bluff! How far off were the rest of the band?