red feet, and trending each way beyond the verge of vision.

About half-distance between this prolonged escarpment and the outlying
hills six large "Conestoga" waggons, locked tongue and tail together,
enclosing a lozenge-shaped or elliptical space--a _corral_--inside which
are fifteen men and five horses.

Only ten of the men are living; the other five are dead, their bodies
lying a-stretch between the wheels of the waggons. Three of the horses
have succumbed to the same fate.

Outside are many dead mules; several still attached to the protruding
poles, that have broken as their bodies fell crashing across them.
Fragments of leather straps and cast gearing tell of others that have
torn loose, and scoured off from the perilous spot.

Inside and all around are traces of a struggle--the ground scored and
furrowed by the hoofs of horses, and the booted feet of men, with here
and there little rivulets and pools of blood. This, fast filtering into
the sand, shows freshly spilled--some of it still smoking.

All the signs tell of recent conflict. And so should they, since it is
still going on, or only suspended to recommence a new scene of the
strife, which promises to be yet more terrible and sanguinary than that
already terminated.

A tragedy easy of explanation. There is no question about why the
waggons have been stopped, or how the men, mules, and horses came to be
killed. Distant about three hundred yards upon the sandy plain are
other men and horses, to the number of near two hundred. Their
half-naked bodies of bronze colour, fantastically marked with devices in
chalk-white, charcoal-black, and vermillion red--their buckskin
breech-clouts and leggings, with plumes sticking tuft-like above their
crowns--all these insignia show them to be Indians.

It is a predatory band of the red pirates, who have attacked a
travelling party of whites--no new spectacle on the prairies.

They have made the first onslaught, which was intended to stampede the
caravan, and at once capture it. This was done before daybreak. Foiled
in the attempt, they are now laying siege to it, having surrounded it on
all sides at a distance just beyond range of the rifles of those
besieged. Their line forms the circumference of a circle of which the
waggon clump is the centre. It is not very regularly preserved, but
ever changing, ever in motion, like some vast constricting serpent that
has thrown its body into a grand coil around its vic