432 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



return to camp and report, and if it should then appear that 

 no sign had yet been discovered by any of them, it was 

 agreed they should spend several days in a regular buffalo- 

 hunting frolic, as these animals seemed to abound greatly in 

 this region. 



Accordingly they were under way quite early, each man 

 following the bent of his own humor and fancy for the time. 



Dan had been travelling in a leisurely sort of a way until 

 noon, when he came upon a scene of such remarkable beauty 

 that he involuntarily stopped to gaze upon it. He had, 

 without observing it, followed up the west branch of the 

 Nueces, until he now found himself at its very head-spring. 

 In front of him a bold and broken mountain stood out 

 somewhat from the chain, at the foot of which he had been 

 riding all the morning. The front of this mountain was almost 

 a square perpendicular, and looked as if it had been cleft 

 from crest to foot by a bolt of thunder, and hurled from out 

 the ranks of its peers. The huge masses of stone with which 

 it seemed built were seamed with a sort of eccentric regularity, 

 and evergreens were rooted along these seams. As the eye 

 descended, these masses became more broken, and assumed 

 a fantastic resemblance to the lines and forms of Gothic 

 architecture in decay — while from the prairie level sprung 

 a broken arch, one side of which was perfect in outline, and 

 the other concealed by the ovei"-hanging masses of evergreen 

 shrubs. At a distance, this seemed the arched gateway of 

 some huge cavern; but when he approached it, he found that 

 the rock slanted in at just sufficient angle to give it, at a 

 distance, the appearance of shadow. Instead of an enormous 

 cavern, it proved to be only a recess or slanting niche, some 

 twenty feet deep at the bottom — from the back part of which, 

 a bold spring burst a little above the level of the prairie, 

 and rushed down and out from the shadow, rejoicing over 

 the white sand, until it sparkled in the checkered sunlight, 

 beneath the over-hanging evergreens outside — then it coursed 



