Farewell, lovely maids of Kansas and Missouri!  If mayhap this writing comes to you, oh, let us meet again; my heart yearns to greet you and your granddaughters.  For surely, though it seems to me as yesterday, the blossoms of forty summers have fallen in our path and whitened our hair.

CHAPTER II.  PERILOUS JOURNEY

After several days I arrived at the end of my railway journey, Junction City, without delay or accident.  The trip was not lacking in interesting details.  The monotony of the never ending prairie was at times enlivened by herds of buffalo and antelope.  On one occasion they delayed our train for several hours.  An enormous herd of thousands upon thousands of buffalo crossed the railroad track in front of our train.  Bellowing, crowding, and pushing, they were not unlike the billows of an angry sea as it crashes and foams over the submerged rocks of a dangerous coast.  Their rear guard was made up of wolves, large and small.  They followed the herd stealthily, taking advantage of every hillock and tuft of buffalo grass to hide themselves.  The gray wolf or lobo, larger and heavier than any dog, and adorned with a bushy tall was a fierce-looking animal, to be sure.  The smaller ones were called coyotes or prairie wolves, and are larger than foxes and of a gray-brown color.  These are the scavengers of the plains, and divide their prey with the vultures of the air.

At times we passed through villages of the prairie dog, consisting of numberless little mounds, with their owners sitting erect on top.  When alarmed, they would yelp and dive into their lairs in the earth.  These little rodents share their habitations with a funny-looking little owl and the rattlesnake.  I believe, however, that the snake is not there as a welcome visitor, but comes in the role of a self-appointed assessor and tax gatherer.  I picked up and adopted a little bulldog which had been either abandoned on the cars or lost by its owner, not then thinking that this little Cerberus, as I called it, should later prove, on one occasion, to be my true and only friend when I was in dire distress and in the extremity of peril.

The town of Junction City, which numbered less than a score of buildings and tents, was in a turmoil of excitement, resembling a nest of disturbed hornets.  Several hundred angry-looking men crowded the only street, every one armed to the teeth.  The great majority were dark- skinned Mexicans, but here and there I noticed the American frontiersman, the professional buffalo hunter and scout.  These were men of proved courage, and I observed that the Mexicans avoided looking them squarely In the face; and when meeting on the public thoroughfare, they invariably gave them precedence of passage.