idle of Turner's fine
horse, and ordered him to dismount. Turner was wholly unarmed; but the
other jerked a little revolving pistol out of his pocket, at which
the Pawnee recoiled; and just then some of our men appearing in the
distance, the whole party whipped their rugged little horses, and made
off. In no way daunted, Turner foolishly persisted in going forward.

Long after leaving him, and late this afternoon, in the midst of a
gloomy and barren prairie, we came suddenly upon the great Pawnee trail,
leading from their villages on the Platte to their war and hunting
grounds to the southward. Here every summer pass the motley concourse;
thousands of savages, men, women, and children, horses and mules, laden
with their weapons and implements, and an innumerable multitude of
unruly wolfish dogs, who have not acquired the civilized accomplishment
of barking, but howl like their wild cousins of the prairie.

The permanent winter villages of the Pawnees stand on the lower Platte,
but throughout the summer the greater part of the inhabitants are
wandering over the plains, a treacherous cowardly banditti, who by a
thousand acts of pillage and murder have deserved summary chastisement
at the hands of government. Last year a Dakota warrior performed a
signal exploit at one of these villages. He approached it alone in the
middle of a dark night, and clambering up the outside of one of the
lodges which are in the form of a half-sphere, he looked in at the round
hole made at the top for the escape of smoke. The dusky light from the
smoldering embers showed him the forms of the sleeping inmates; and
dropping lightly through the opening, he unsheathed his knife, and
stirring the fire coolly selected his victims. One by one he stabbed and
scalped them, when a child suddenly awoke and screamed. He rushed from
the lodge, yelled a Sioux war-cry, shouted his name in triumph and
defiance, and in a moment had darted out upon the dark prairie, leaving
the whole village behind him in a tumult, with the howling and baying of
dogs, the screams of women and the yells of the enraged warriors.

Our friend Kearsley, as we learned on rejoining him, signalized himself
by a less bloody achievement. He and his men were good woodsmen, and
well skilled in the use of the rifle, but found themselves wholly out of
their element on the prairie. None of them had ever seen a buffalo and
they had very vague conceptions of his nature and appearance. On the
d