Page:Boissonnas, Un Vaincu, English, 1875.djvu/41

 possession of his domicile.

A few short expeditions interrupted the monotony of that existence.

“I have just returned from my expedition into the Comanche country ; had a long trip of forty days…” he says in one of his letters. “The main column, which I accompanied, travelled eight hundred miles. We visited the head-waters of the Wichita and Brazos rivers… and swept down the valleys of the Conehn, the Colorado,…” etc., etc. “We could find no Indians, and all the traces of them were old. The country had been fired in many places, and in some places it was still burning and abandoned…”

“The weather was intensely hot, and as we had no tents, we had the full benefit of the sun…”

“Camp Cooper, August 4th, 1856… The sun was fiery hot. The atmosphere like the blast from a hot-air furnace, the water salt…”

On August 25, he writes again, “I received to-day notice (through my spies) that a party of Comanches who have been on a marauding expedition to Mexico… are endeavoring to get around our camp on their way north, and are some fifteen miles below. They have separated into gangs of six, eight, and ten, to escape detection. I am in the act of sending out a company of cavalry to endeavor to catch them… I should go myself but for my forced journey to the Rio Grande…”

Such a military service must have held few attractive