Page:Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains.djvu/534

406 was doing well, from the fact that most all of the people passing there patronized him. This family was from Indiana. After I had told him who I was and what would be my business, he insisted on my staying over night with him when convenient, saying that it would not cost me a cent. Thanking him for his hospitable offer, we rode on, keeping the Butterfield route. Late that afternoon we met a train of sixteen wagons on the way to California. The people told us that the day before they had seen where five wagons had just been burned. I asked how far it was, and they thought it was twenty- five miles from where we met them. When we heard of this we pushed on, thinking there might be some dead bodies there and that we could bury them. On arriving at the scene, sure enough we found three dead bodies two hundred and fifty yards from the burned wagons; one of them being that of an old man, and the others, two boys twelve and fourteen years of age. The Indians had not stripped the bodies nor mutilated them, only they were all filled with arrows. The dead bodies were all dressed in home-made jeans. We found a few pieces of wagon boxes that had not been burned and dug as good a grave as we could in the sand, giving them as good a burial as we could under the circumstances. This being done, we took the trail of the Indians, which led off in a south-westerly direction. I felt confident that it had been at least three days since this depredation had been committed. My object in following them up was to see if we could get any evidence of white prisoners in their camp. For the first ten or fifteen miles they kept on the roughest, rockiest ground they could find,