16 ON THE FEONTIEE. 



severally received could not, by the wildest stretch of the 

 imagination, be considered encouraging, excepting that, as 

 it was quite contradictory, it might be all unreliable. 



To give the service due precedence firstly, the word 

 from the Fort. I had there been told, should we strike 

 north-west to the Republican fork of the Kaw river, we 

 would find a few deer and some turkeys, and, if the 

 buffalo were working that way, there would be plenty of 

 them in a week or two, though none were then there, nor, 

 did my informants think, any Indians ; but such route was 

 in the track of the Indian hunting-parties from the north, 

 and, should one of them discover us, if we were a smaller 

 party than thirty to forty, they might "gobble us up," 

 for the peace was already broken. News had just come in 

 that the Santa Fe train had been attacked on the Arkansas 

 route, captured, and the teamsters scalped by, it was 

 believed, a band of united Sioux and Cheyennes, who 

 were moving towards the Salinas river; and for us to go 

 in that direction would be simply to court destruction. 



My comrade had seen the " storekeeper " of the settle- 

 ment, and some men who were loafing at his bar. Their 

 united statements amounted to this : It was no use going 

 to the Republican to hunt buffaloes, or anything else ; the 

 Indians were too thick there, and had driven all the game 

 to the Salinas river. That was the place to go to ! The 

 officers at the Fort were trying to get up a scare about an 

 Indian war. It was all stuff; they did it to make them- 

 selves important ; they the speakers were, any one of 

 them, willing to go alone to the Salinas, and hunt there all 

 the season. No danger of Indians pestering hunters. 



