their mighty chieftain, the clouds below
us were rolling upwards, were enveloping the entire mountain upon which
we stood. Fearful of being lost in a snowstorm upon these bleak heights,
we descended rapidly down a cleft, and regained our bivouac at the foot
of the mountain just as the snow began to fall.

Here we found our blankets and other camp equipment as we had left them.
But the ravens had robbed us of all our food, other than an unstripped
fragment of the deer's ribs. Though one of the men had killed a
partridge during our descent, the bird and the lean deer bones together
formed a scant enough meal for four men who had not eaten in two days.

About noon the next day we shot two buffaloes, upon whose flesh we
gorged ourselves like Indians, and I, for one, am convinced that we had
well earned the full meal.

In the valley, all up and down the creek, we found many old Comanche
camps, but the Indians had undoubtedly gone south for the Winter.

The next day brought us back to our little stockade on the Arkansas.

CHAPTER XVIII

FAMINE AND FROST

Many even of our Western-bred officers would have considered themselves
justified in lying about camp for at least a day after such a trip. Not
so Pike. Toward noon of the next day, which was the last of November,
our entire party marched on up the main stream, in the thick of a heavy
snowstorm.

We had at last come to the real hardships of our voyage. Within the week
two or three of the men suffered frosted feet. The temperature fell to
nearly twenty degrees below zero, so that even I felt the cold keenly
through my hunting clothes, while the Lieutenant and the others, clad
only in their cotton wear, suffered still more from the stinging frost.

Yet, despite all the troubles and hardships of ourselves and our
half-starved horses, we held to our explorations, day after day, killing
an occasional buffalo or deer, and gradually working our way into the
midst of the mighty mountains, northward and westward behind the Grand
Peak, along what we thought to be the Spanish trace. At last we came to
a large stream, which, to our astonishment, ran to the northeast. Though
against all our previous theories, we were forced to believe that this
must be the river La Platte. Ascending the stream in a northwesterly
direction, all alike suffering greatly from the cold of these high
valleys, we passed signs of an immense encampment of Indians. But we saw
no more of the Spanis