s, starry night lured me, and I
decided to travel. The mutineers, eager to reach a railroad as soon as
possible, agreed to go. The skiff led and the _Atom_ followed with
paddles. A mile or so below we ran into shallows and grounded. We waded
far around in the cold water that chilled us to the marrow, but could
find neither entrance nor outlet to the pocket in which we found
ourselves. Wading ashore, we made a cheerless camp in the brush, leaving
the boats stuck in the shallows. For the first time, the division in the
camp was well marked. The Kid and I instinctively made our bed together
under one blanket, and the others bunked apart. We had become the main
party of the expedition; the others were now merely enforced camp
followers. It was funny in an unpleasant way.

In the morning a sea of stiff fog hid our boats. Packing the camp stuff
on our backs, we waded about and found the crafts.

At last, after a number of cheerless days and nights of continuous
travel, the great, open, rolling prairies ahead of us indicated our
approach toward the end of the journey's first stage. The country began
to look like North Dakota, though we were still nearly two hundred miles
away. The monotony of the landscape was depressing. It seemed a thousand
miles to the sunrise. The horizon was merely a blue haze--and the
endless land was sere. The river ran for days with a succession of
regularly occurring right-angled bends to the north and east. Each
headland shot out in the same way, with, it seemed, the same snags in
the water under it, and the same cottonwoods growing on it; and opposite
each headland was the same stony bluff, wind- and water-carved in the
same way: until at last we cried out against the tediousness of the
oft-repeated story, wondering whether or not we were continually passing
the same point, and somehow slipping back to pass it again.

But at last we reached Wolf Point--the first town in five hundred miles.
We had seen no town since we left Benton. An odd little burlesque of a
town it was; but walking up its main street we felt very metropolitan
after weeks on those lonesome river stretches.

Five Assiniboine Indian girls seemed to be the only women in the town. I
coaxed them to stand for a photograph on the incontestable grounds that
they were by far the prettiest women I had seen for many days! The
effect of my generous praise is fixed forever on the pictured faces
presented herewith.

Here, during the day, Fr