Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 1.djvu/136

110 over the virgin ground to stakes and piles of stone and buffalo bones and dung erected by the locating party, and the mule tracks left in stocking the stations. The stage had no springs, and hence there was altogether too much jolting. I got out at every ascent, but none the less became sore and stiff, and was glad to stretch out on my blankets at the end of each day's journey. My fatigue ensured the soundest sleep, notwithstanding the hardness of my couch. The bracing prairie air, too, gave me an eager appetite for the two meals a day to which we were limited from want of time. The most magnificent weather favored us all the way.

The first two days from Fort Riley we saw nothing but a monotonous succession of plateaus, frequently broken by ridges, with fringes of cottonwood trees indicating water-courses. We knew that we were in a wilderness inhabited only by Indians and wild beasts. Of the presence of the latter, we had formal notice in the howling of wolves all around us at night. On the third day, we observed that the ordinary prairie grass had given way to the short, early species known as buffalo grass, which had already attained full growth. In the afternoon, the driver, as we came upon a new, long-stretched-out plateau, suddenly shouted, “Here they are,” and pointed with his whip at a long black line ahead of us. We were, indeed, in sight of buffaloes. We approached them apace, and, as we came nearer, one line after another appeared before us, and we perceived that we were going right among a large herd of the wild cattle of the Plains. Soon their clumsy, shaggy bodies could be seen in every direction, aggregating thousands of head, bulls and cows, and hundreds of calves. They were not mixed up in a common and great mass, but formed innumerable files, as it were, each headed by a powerful bull. They grazed very quietly, and our passage right through them did not disturb them in the least, though we came within twenty to thirty steps of several files. Only here and there some of the calves took alarm and broke into their clumsy