It was early in the afternoon when I heard her horse's feet coming up
behind me as I rode. She passed me at a gallop; laughing back as though
in challenge, and so we raced on for a time, until we quite left out of
sight behind us the remainder of our party. Ellen Meriwether was a
Virginia girl with Western experience, and it goes without saying that
she rode well--of course in the cavalry saddle and with the cross seat.
Her costume still was composed of the somewhat shriveled and wrinkled
buckskins which had been so thoroughly wetted in crossing the river. I
noticed that she had now even discarded her shoes, and wore the
aboriginal costume almost in full, moccasins and all, her gloves and hat
alone remaining to distinguish her in appearance at a distance from a
native woman of the Plains. The voluminous and beruffled skirts of the
period, and that feminine monstrosity of the day, the wide spreading
crinoline, she had left far behind her at the Missouri River. Again the
long curls, which civilization at that time decreed, had been forgotten.
Her hair at the front and sides half-waved naturally, but now, instead
of neck curls or the low dressing of the hair which in those days partly
covered the fashionable forehead, she had, like a native woman, arranged
her hair in two long braids. Her hat, no longer the flat straw or the
flaring, rose-laden bonnet of the city, was now simply a man's cavalry
hat, and almost her only mark of coquetry was the rakish cockade which
confined it at one side. Long, heavy-hooped earrings such as women at
that time wore, and which heretofore I had never known her to employ,
she now disported. Brown as her face was now becoming, one might indeed,
at a little distance, have suspected her to be rather a daughter of the
Plains than a belle of civilization. I made some comment on this. She
responded by sitting the more erect in her saddle and drawing a long,
deep breath.

"I think I shall throw away my gloves," she said, "and hunt up some
brass bracelets. I grow more Indian every day. Isn't it glorious, here
on the Plains? Isn't it _glorious_!"

It so seemed to me, and I so advised her, saying I wished the western
journey might be twice as long.

"But Mr. Orme was saying that he rather thought you might take an escort
and go back down the river."

"I wish Mr. Orme no disrespect," I answered, "but neither he nor any one
else regulates my travel. I have already told you how necessary it was
for m