he band of horses. After the rather
melancholy parting we arranged our packs, and about ten o'clock started
out on what then seemed, and afterwards proved, to be a perilous voyage
through deserts, and over rough mountains. To avoid a high range of
mountains, our course was for a time northeast but, after passing that
range we bore to the northwest.

The days were quite warm, but the nights were cold. During the first day
we killed and ate one small rabbit, and this, with a few seed buds
gathered from wild rose bushes, constituted two days' rations. On the
third we did not have even the rabbit or rose seed buds, but late in the
afternoon we found some small red berries, similar in appearance to what
I, in my childhood, knew and relished as Solomon's seal berries. I being
a natural coward, and fearing that they might poison me, did not eat any
of them, but generously allowed my good friend to eat them all.

We had now been almost entirely without water for two days and nights.
When night came on we picketed our animals in a grass plot and lay down
near them to see that they did not get tangled in the ropes and hurt, or
that some red skin, not having the fear of the Lord in his heart, did
not come and take them away. About ten o'clock my companion began to
complain of pain in his stomach and bowels, and was soon vomiting at a
fearful rate; so violently, indeed, that I was apprehensive that he
might die. If I had had an emetic I would have given it to him to have
assisted nature in pumping those devilish little red berries out of him,
for I felt quite sure that they were the cause of his illness. Perhaps
it was fortunate that there was no medecine at hand, for if there had
been I might have killed him with it.

He suffered most intensely, and soon became very thirsty, and, there
being no water within many miles of us, he appealed to me to bleed one
of the animals and let him drink the blood; I refused: he insisted; I
again refused: he commanded; I still refused. He swore, and called me
almost everything except a good Christian; he even expressed the wish
that I, his friend, might be sent to a certain place where the heat is
most intense, and the fire is never quenched.

At about eleven o'clock, when his pains were most severe, a dark cloud,
the first we had seen for months, came over us, and a little rain began
to fall, when I at once opened our little camp kettle and turned the lid
upside down, and into both kettle and