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From a point a mile in front of us, their rear line extends on the north to the bluffs bounding the banks of the river on which we had camped. On the south it reaches the summits of some distant heights fully six miles away.
These buttes are outliers of the same beds of rocks as are exposed on the faces of the bluffs, thinly laminated shales and sandstones of many colors, standing above in vertical cliffs and buttressed below with a water-carved talus; some of them attain an altitude of nearly a thousand feet above the level of the river.
Here the trees are scattered so that the eye passes through them, and ever and again a long lawn sweeps back into the country and up the steep side of a hill, making the traveler long to stay there and linger through the oaks, and climb the bluffs, and lay about on the bold but easy summits.
I long for the sunny South; and trusting myself once more to thy current I glide onward. I pass the sea-like estuary of the Ohio, and the embouchure of another of thy mightiest tributaries, the famed river of the plains. How changed the aspect of thy shores! I no longer look upon bold bluffs and beetling cliffs.
Then the bush broke and became scattered into small bluffs, and a sniff of the bracing air of the plains brushed away the last odor of the redolent glades they were leaving. It was here that Arizona roused himself. He was of the prairie, belonging to the prairie. The woodlands depressed him, but the prairie made him expansive.
We made nightly rides of about fifty miles, and at dawn would land on one of the small islands of the river, conceal ourselves and the boat in the tall grass from which we were able to see all that passed by trail and bluffs, and not be seen ourselves. Our greatest danger was in being discovered by the Indians on the high bluffs, or a visit from them to the island we occupied.
Despite the fact that he was in a sort of valley, with towering peaks and bluffs upon either hand, a great many boulders and obstructions obtruded themselves in his path, and he did some climbing, clambering, and jumping that would have reflected no discredit upon a mountain goat.
"Now," concluded the old cattleman, "folks don't make them bluffs for the sake of talkin' at a mark not in this country." Nevertheless, in spite of that prediction, the summer passed without any personal clash. The cattle came out from the mountains rather earlier than usual, gaunt, wiry, active.
From McLean's post he can see both parties in the gathering light, the Indians, slowly and cautiously now, beginning the ascent to the bluffs, the captain and his men "speeding it" to get first to the scene.
A dozen of us goes along, makin' good them bluffs about Billy's worth; Enright an' Peets is in the stage with the old mother, an' the rest of us on our ponies as a bodygyard of honor.
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