Page:Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains.djvu/260

194 both shot the same antelope. We dressed the game and took it to camp, arriving there just as the other two scouts came in from the south. The boys were all up in camp, and considerable excitement prevailed among them, they having heard two shots, and thought the Indians had attacked us. They were all hungry as wolves, so we broiled and ate antelope almost as long as there was any to eat.

Almost the entire scout force were from New York, and were new recruits who had never known what it was to rough it, and they said this was the first meal they had ever made on meat alone. After breakfast was over, it now being understood that we would lie over until the supply train should come up, my first assistant scout and two others took a trip to a mountain some two miles from camp, which was the highest mountain near us, taking my glasses along to look for the supply train. In about two hours one of the scouts returned to camp in great haste and somewhat excited, saying that about fifteen or twenty miles distant they had seen a band of Indians who were traveling in the direction of camp. We all saddled our horses, left a note at camp informing Capt. Mills where we had gone and for what purpose. We started for what has ever since been known as Look-out Mountain—of course not the famous Lookout Mountain of Tennessee—and there joined the other three scouts. From the top of this mountain we could get a good view of the Indians through the field glasses. We watched them until about one o'clock, when they went into camp in the head of a little ravine some five miles distant. This convinced us that there was water and that they