METAPHYSICS OF BEAR HUNTING. 347 



quarters, in a very bad humor — what would you conjecture 

 was the cause ? Simply that there had been no fighting to 

 do for a whole month ! 



I had never heard a spoiled belle complain half so patheti- 

 cally of a decaying season, and the scarcity of victims, as did 

 these petulant amateurs, of the late difficulties, in the way of 

 raising a fight ! They seemed to imagine the whole world 

 was conspiring against them — that a coalition, including not 

 Mexicans and Indians only, but even " His celestial highness, 

 the brother of the sun," had been formed for the express pur- 

 pose of killing them ofi", through a stagnation of blood, super- 

 vening upon the horrible monotony of an endless peace ! 

 Rather than die so base a death, they were just vowing to 

 rush into any alternative extreme — sack some village or 

 Catholic Mission on the other side of the Rio Grande — or go 

 up into the mountains and burn an Indian town, and see if 

 that would not stir the hornets and give them something to do. 



After the deliberation due in so dire a strait. Hays, their 

 good-natured little captain, too much moved, perhaps, by the 

 tenderness of his sympathy, and a desire to give them full 

 amends for all they had endured, decided upon the latter of 

 these alternatives. 



Lither of them was promising enough ; but he, as in duty 

 bound, of course selected that around which clustered the 

 fullest fruition in perspective! To form some idea of his 

 accommodating temper and their insatiable gourmandie, 

 imagine a party of eight white men and two Mexicans, 

 traversing an almost desert prairie, three hundred miles in 

 width, with the purpose to reach the mountainous region near 

 the sources of the San Saba river, in which lay the fastnesses 

 of those formidable tribes that scour the plains of Mexico 

 and Texas — intending, when gained, to penetrate them, and 

 destroy some one of the towns hid away in their gorges — 

 with, furthermore, the pleasant prospect of having thousands 

 of infuriated warriors howling, on their trail back to the very 



