to the
right and left as far as I could see. Its width in the direction that I
was going I judged to be about twenty miles. On its farther border the
cactus plain began again, sloping gradually upward to the horizon, along
which was a fringe of cedar trees--the willows of my vision! In that
country a cedar will not grow within thirty miles of water if it knows it.

On my return journey I coldly ignored the appeals of the camp-kettle, and
when I met the rescuing party which had been for some hours trailing me
made no allusion to the real purpose of my excursion. When the chief asked
if I purposed to enter a plea of temporary insanity I replied that I would
reserve my defense for the present; and in fact I never did disclose it
until now.

I had afterward the satisfaction of seeing the chief, an experienced
plainsman, consume a full hour, rifle in hand, working round to the
leeward of a dead coyote in the sure and certain hope of bagging a
sleeping buffalo. Mirage or no mirage, you must not too implicitly trust
your eyes in the fantastic atmosphere of the high plains.

I remember that one forenoon I looked forward to the base of the Big Horn
Mountains and selected a most engaging nook for the night's camp. My good
opinion of it was confirmed when we reached it three days later. The
deception in this instance was due to nothing but the marvelous lucidity
of the atmosphere and the absence of objects of known dimensions, and
these sources of error are sometimes sufficient of themselves to produce
the most incredible illusions. When they are in alliance with the mirage
the combination's pranks are bewildering.

One of the most grotesque and least comfortable of my experiences with the
magicians of the air occurred near the forks of the Platte. There had been
a tremendous thunder-storm, lasting all night. In the morning my party set
forward over the soaken prairie under a cloudless sky intensely blue. I
was riding in advance, absorbed in thought, when I was suddenly roused to
a sense of material things by exclamations of astonishment and
apprehension from the men behind. Looking forward, I beheld a truly
terrifying spectacle. Immediately in front, at a distance, apparently, of
not more than a quarter-mile, was a long line of the most formidable
looking monsters that the imagination ever conceived. They were taller
than trees. In them the elements of nature seemed so fantastically and
discordantly confused and blended, compo