218 A Trip on the Prairie. 



In midsummer the storms are rarely of long duration, 

 but are very severe while they last. I remember well 

 one day when I was caught in such a storm. I had gone 

 some twenty-five miles from the ranch to see the round-up, 

 which had reached what is known as the Oxbow of the 

 Little Missouri, where the river makes a great loop round 

 a flat grassy bottom, on which the cattle herd was 

 gathered. I stayed, seeing the cattle cut out and the 

 calves branded, until after dinner ; for it was at the time 

 of the year when the days were longest. 



At last the work was ended, and I started home in the 

 twilight. The horse splashed across the shallow ford, and 

 then spent half an hour in climbing up through the 

 rugged side hills, till we reached the top of the first great 

 plateau that had to be crossed. As soon as I got on it I 

 put in the spurs and started off at a gallop. In the dusk 

 the brown level land stretched out in formless expanse 

 ahead of me, unrelieved, except by the bleached white of 

 a buffalo's skull, whose outlines glimmered indistinctly to 

 one side of the course I was riding. On my left the sun 

 had set behind a row of jagged buttes, that loomed up in 

 sharp relief against the western sky ; above them it had 

 left a bar of yellow light, which only made more intense 

 the darkness of the surrounding heavens. In the quarter 

 towards which I was heading there had gathered a lower- 

 ing mass of black storm-clouds, lit up by the incessant 

 play of the lightning. The wind had totally died away, 

 and the death-like stillness was only broken by the con- 

 tinuous, measured beat of the horse's hoofs as he galloped 

 over the plain, and at times by the muttered roll of the 

 distant thunder. 



