“I will meet you at Fort Laramie on the 1st of August,” said I to Shaw.

“That is,” replied he, “if we don’t meet before that.  I think I shall follow after you in a day or two.”

This in fact he attempted, and he would have succeeded if he had not encountered obstacles against which his resolute spirit was of no avail.  Two days after I left him he sent Delorier to the fort with the cart and baggage, and set out for the mountains with Henry Chatillon; but a tremendous thunderstorm had deluged the prairie, and nearly obliterated not only our trail but that of the Indians themselves.  They followed along the base of the mountains, at a loss in which direction to go.  They encamped there, and in the morning Shaw found himself poisoned by ivy in such a manner that it was impossible for him to travel.  So they turned back reluctantly toward Fort Laramie.  Shaw’s limbs were swollen to double their usual size, and he rode in great pain.  They encamped again within twenty miles of the fort, and reached it early on the following morning.  Shaw lay seriously ill for a week, and remained at the fort till I rejoined him some time after.

To return to my own story.  We shook hands with our friends, rode out upon the prairie, and clambering the sandy hollows that were channeled in the sides of the hills gained the high plains above.  If a curse had been pronounced upon the land it could not have worn an aspect of more dreary and forlorn barrenness.  There were abrupt broken hills, deep hollows, and wide plains; but all alike glared with an insupportable whiteness under the burning sun.  The country, as if parched by the heat, had cracked into innumerable fissures and ravines, that not a little impeded our progress.  Their steep sides were white and raw, and along the bottom we several times discovered the broad tracks of the terrific grizzly bear, nowhere more abundant than in this region.  The ridges of the hills were hard as rock, and strewn with pebbles of flint and coarse red jasper; looking from them, there was nothing to relieve the desert uniformity of the prospect, save here and there a pine-tree clinging at the edge of a ravine, and stretching out its rough, shaggy arms.  Under the scorching heat these melancholy trees diffused their peculiar resinous odor through the sultry air.  There was something in it, as I approached them, that recalled old associations; the pine-clad mountains of New England, traversed in days of health and buoyancy, rose like a reality before my fancy.  In passing that arid waste I was goaded with a morbid thirst produced by my disorder, and I thought with a longing desire on the crystal treasure poured in such wasteful profusion from our thousand hills.  Shutting my eyes, I more than half believed that I heard the deep plunging and gurgling of waters in the bowels of the shaded rocks.  I could see their dark ice glittering far down amid the crevices, and the cold drops trickling from the long green mosses.