editionary force of four men
had moved to the relief of the beleaguered post, but finding it impossible
to "raise the siege" had--with a score of troopers--pushed on to Fort C.F.
Smith, and thence into the Unknown.

The first part of this new journey was well enough; there were game and
water. Where we swam the Yellowstone we had an abundance of both, for the
entire river valley, two or three miles wide, was dotted with elk. There
were hundreds. As we advanced they became scarce; buffalo became scarce;
bear, deer, rabbits, sage-hens, even prairie dogs gave out, and we were
near starving. Water gave out too, and starvation was a welcome state: our
hunger was so much less disagreeable than our thirst that it was a real
treat.

However, we got to Benton, Heaven knows how and why, but we were a
sorry-looking lot, though our scalps were intact. If in all that region
there is a mountain that I have not climbed, a river that I have not swum,
an alkali pool that I have not thrust my muzzle into, or an Indian that I
have not shuddered to think about, I am ready to go back in a Pullman
sleeper and do my duty.

From Fort Benton we came down through Helena and Virginia City,
Montana--then new mining camps--to Salt Lake, thence westward to
California. Our last bivouac was on the old camp of the Donner party,
where, in the flickering lights and dancing shadows made by our camp-fire,
I first heard the story of that awful winter, and in the fragrance of the
meat upon the coals fancied I could detect something significantly
uncanny. The meat which the Donner party had cooked at that spot was not
quite like ours. Pardon: I mean it was not like that which we cooked.

THE MIRAGE

Since the overland railways have long been carrying many thousands of
persons across the elevated plateaus of the continent the mirage in many
of its customary aspects has become pretty well known to great numbers of
persons all over the Union, and the tales of early observers who came "der
blains agross" are received with a less frigid inhospitality than they
formerly were by incredulous pioneers who had come "der Horn aroundt," as
the illustrious Hans Breitmann phrases it; but in its rarer and more
marvelous manifestations, the mirage is still a rock upon which many a
reputation for veracity is wrecked remediless. With an ambition intrepidly
to brave this disaster, and possibly share it with the hundreds of devoted
souls whose disregard of the injunction