noon of the following day they came back, their horses looking none the
better for the journey. Henry seemed dejected. The woman was dead, and
his children must henceforward be exposed, without a protector, to the
hardships and vicissitudes of Indian life. Even in the midst of his
grief he had not forgotten his attachment to his bourgeois, for he had
procured among his Indian relatives two beautifully ornamented buffalo
robes, which he spread on the ground as a present to us.

Shaw lighted his pipe, and told me in a few words the history of his
journey. When I went to the fort they left me, as I mentioned, at the
mouth of Chugwater. They followed the course of the little stream all
day, traversing a desolate and barren country. Several times they came
upon the fresh traces of a large war party--the same, no doubt, from
whom we had so narrowly escaped an attack. At an hour before sunset,
without encountering a human being by the way, they came upon the lodges
of the squaw and her brothers, who, in compliance with Henry's message,
had left the Indian village in order to join us at our camp. The lodges
were already pitched, five in number, by the side of the stream. The
woman lay in one of them, reduced to a mere skeleton. For some time she
had been unable to move or speak. Indeed, nothing had kept her alive
but the hope of seeing Henry, to whom she was strongly and faithfully
attached. No sooner did he enter the lodge than she revived, and
conversed with him the greater part of the night. Early in the morning
she was lifted into a travail, and the whole party set out toward our
camp. There were but five warriors; the rest were women and children.
The whole were in great alarm at the proximity of the Crow war party,
who would certainly have destroyed them without mercy had they met. They
had advanced only a mile or two, when they discerned a horseman, far
off, on the edge of the horizon. They all stopped, gathering together in
the greatest anxiety, from which they did not recover until long after
the horseman disappeared; then they set out again. Henry was riding with
Shaw a few rods in advance of the Indians, when Mahto-Tatonka, a younger
brother of the woman, hastily called after them. Turning back, they
found all the Indians crowded around the travail in which the woman was
lying. They reached her just in time to hear the death-rattle in
her throat. In a moment she lay dead in the basket of the vehicle. A
complete still