t, we soon came up with the tribe of Lepans, of which
old Castro was the chief.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

The Lepans were themselves going northwards, and for a few days we
skirted, in company with them, the western borders of the Cross Timbers.
The immense prairies of Texas are for hundreds and hundreds of miles
bordered on the east by a belt of thick and almost impenetrable forests,
called the Cross Timbers. Their breadth varies from seventy to one
hundred miles. There the oak and hiccory grow tall and beautiful, but
the general appearance of the country is poor, broken, and rugged.
These forests abound with deer and bears, and sometimes the buffalo,
when hotly pursued by the Indians in the prairies, will take refuge in
its closest thickets. Most of the trees contain hives of bees full of a
very delicate honey, the great luxury of the pioneers along these
borders.

We now took our leave of the Lepans and our two white friends, who would
fain have accompanied us to the Comanches had there been a chance of
returning to civilisation through a safe road; as it was, Gabriel,
Roche, and I resumed our journey alone. During two or three days we
followed the edge of the wood, every attempt to penetrate into the
interior proving quite useless, so thick were the bushes and thorny
briars. Twice or thrice we perceived on some hills, at a great
distance, smoke and fires, but we could not tell what Indians might be
there encamped.

We had left the Timbers and had scarcely advanced ten miles in a
westerly direction, when a dog of a most miserable appearance joined our
company. He was soon followed by two others as lean and as weak as
himself. They were evidently Indian dogs of the wolf breed, and
miserable, starved animals they looked, with the ribs almost bare, while
their tongues, parched and hanging downwards, showed clearly the want of
water in these horrible regions. We had ourselves been twenty-four
hours without having tasted any, and our horses were quite exhausted.

We were slowly descending the side of a swell in the prairie, when a
buffalo passed at full speed, ten yards before us, closely pursued by a
Tonquewa Indian (a ferocious tribe), mounted upon a small horse, whose
graceful form excited our admiration. This savage was armed with a long
lance, and covered with a cloak of deer-skin, richly ornamented, his
long black hair undulating with the breeze.

A second Indian soon followed the first, and they wer