Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/360

 camp rumors to be baseless. In only one instance had there been the slightest reason for believing that hostiles had approached our position. An old man, who had been following the command for some reason never very clearly understood, had come into camp on Tongue River and stated that while out on the plain, letting his pony have a nibble of grass, and while he himself had been sleeping under a box elder, he had been awakened by the report of a gun and had seen two Indian boys scampering off to the north: he showed a bullet hole through the saddle, but the general opinion in camp was that the story had been made up out of whole cloth, because parties of men had been much farther down Tongue River that morning, scouting and hunting, without perceiving the slightest sign or trace of hostiles. Thirty miners from Montana had also come into camp from the same place, and they too had been unable to discover traces of the assailants.

The perennial character of the springs and streams watering the pasturage of the Tongue River region was shown by the great masses of snow and ice, which were slowly yielding to the assaults of the summer sun on the flanks of "Cloud Peak" and its sister promontories. Every few hundred yards gurgling rivulets and crystal brooks leaped down from the protecting shadow of pine and juniper groves and sped away to join the Tongue, which warned us of its own near presence in a cañon on the left of the trail by the murmur of its current flowing swiftly from basin to basin over a succession of tiny falls. Exuberant Nature had carpeted the knolls and dells with vernal grasses and lovely flowers; along the brook-sides, wild rose-buds peeped; and there were harebells, wild flax, forget-me-nots, and astragulus to dispute with their more gaudy companions—the sunflowers—possession of the soil. The silicious limestones, red clays, and sandstones of the valley were replaced by granites more or less perfectly crystallized. Much pine and fir timber was encountered, at first in small copses, then in more considerable bodies, lastly in dense forests. A very curious variety of juniper made its appearance: it was very stunted, grew prone to the ground, and until approached closely might be mistaken for a bed of moss. In the protecting solitude of these frozen peaks, lakes of melted snow were frequent; upon their pellucid surface ducks swam gracefully, admiring their own reflection.