182 IN THE DAYS OF AUDUBON 



lie that lias brought you death ! " he exclaimed wherever he 

 met with his people. " Destroy the white man ! " 



He rode on until he became so fevered, weak, and dizzy 

 that he could ride no farther steadily, then he turned home. 



There white men came to his assistance. Their kind- 

 ness to him cooled his spirit of revenge, and he confessed 

 to them his wild ride. 



" Bury me before your fort," he said, " and all my 

 trophies with me, and when you pass over my grave for- 

 give me." 



A yet stranger tale is told of these days of alarm and 

 death. It is of a cure. 



A young Indian was burning with the eruptive fever. 

 He probably desired to end his misery, and rolled down 

 into a bed of mud and mire. 



The mud-bath relieved him, and he crawled out of the 

 mire and rested on the grass. 



The sun was intensely hot, and it baked the mire on to 

 his body almost an inch thick. 



But the fever abated. He crawled home, like a great 

 brick. He was speedily recovering. 



His care now was to rid himself of his incasement. The 

 eruption came off with the baked earth, and he recovered, 

 but with scars. 



Famine succeeded the plague. According to Major 

 Mitchell, a local authority, one hundred and fifty thousand 

 Indians — Mandans, Sioux, and Blackfeet — died. Out of 



