on the
plains to the eastward, hunting for buffalo. They had not found any, but
they had found all the grass dry and parched by a long drought, so that
no buffalo in his senses was likely to be there, and so that their own
ponies could hardly make a living by picking all night. Then one
afternoon a great swarm of locusts found where they were and alighted
upon them just as a westerly wind died out. The locusts remained long
enough to eat up whatever grass there was left. All through the evening
the Nez Perces had heard the harsh, tingling hum of those devourers, as
they argued among themselves whether or not it were best to stay and dig
for the roots of the grass. The wind came up suddenly and strongly about
midnight, and the locusts decided to take advantage of it and sail away
after better grass, but they did not leave any behind them. They set
out for the nearest white settlements in hope of getting corn and
apple-tree leaves, and all that sort of thing.

The band of Nez Perces would have moved away the next morning under any
circumstances, but when morning came they were in a terribly bad
predicament. Not one of them carried a watch, or he might have known
that it was about three o'clock, and very dark, when a worse disaster
than the visit of the locusts took place. By five or six minutes past
three it was all done completely, and it was the work of a wicked old
mule.

All but a half a dozen of the ponies and mules of the band had been
gathered and tethered in what is called a "corral," only that it had no
fence, at a short distance from the lodges. Nobody dreamed of any danger
to that corral, and there was none from the outside, even after the boys
who were set to watch it had curled down and gone to sleep. All the
danger was inside, and it was also inside of that mule. He was hungry
and vicious. He had lived in the white "settlements," and knew
something. He was fastened by a long hide lariat to a peg driven into
the ground, as were all the others, and he knew that the best place to
gnaw in two that lariat was close to the peg, where he could get a good
pull upon it. As soon as he had freed himself he tried the lariat of
another mule, and found that the peg had been driven into loose earth
and came right up. That was a scientific discovery, and he tried several
other pegs. Some came up with more or less hard tugging, and as fast as
they came up a pony or a mule was free. Then he came to a peg he could
not pull,