st be as bad as a prairie fire."

"Worse, my lad; ever so much worse. You can see a prairie fire fifty
miles away--more nor that at night, ever so much--and you have plenty of
time to set the grass afire ahead of you, and clear the ground afore it
comes up, though it does travel, when the wind is blowing, much faster
than a horse can gallop. I have seen it go thirty miles an hour, the
flames just leaping out ahead of it and setting grass alight a hundred
yards before the main body of the fire came up. I tell you it is a
terrible sight when the grass has just dried, and is breast-high; but,
as I say, there ain't no cause to be afraid if you do but keep your
head. You just pulls up a band of grass a couple of feet wide, and
lights it ahead of you; the wind naturally takes it away from you, and
you look sharp with blanket or leggings to beat it down, and prevent it
working back agin the wind across the bit of ground you have stripped.
As it goes it widens out right and left, and you have soon got a wide
strip cleared in front of you. In course you don't go on to it as long
as you can help it, not till you are drove by the other fire coming up;
that gives it time to cool a bit. If you must go on soon, owing to being
pressed, or from the fire you have lit working round agin the wind--as
it will do if the grass is very dry--the best plan is to cut up your
leggings, or any bit of hide you have got with you, the rawer the
better, and wrap them round your horse's feet and legs; but it ain't
often necessary to do that, as it don't take long for the ashes to cool
enough so as to stand on."

Fortunately a bottom with good grass had been found close at hand to the
place where they encamped, and when the caravan proceeded the draft oxen
were all the better for their two days' rest.

"We shall have to begin to look out pretty sharp for Injin signs," Abe
said, as they started early next morning. "Fresh meat is good, but we
can do without it; there's enough pork and jerked meat in the waggons to
last pretty nigh across the plains; but we are getting where we may
expect Injins in earnest. We might, in course, have met 'em anywhere,
but as they know the caravans have all got to come across their ground,
it don't stand to reason as they would take the trouble to travel very
far east to meet 'em. I don't say as we won't knock down a stag, now and
agin, if we comes across 'em, but the less firing the better. We have
been hunting up till no