THE ROUND-UP 



51 



in the earl)- mornings ; although this is not always so, and when the 

 weather stays hot and mosquitoes are plenty, the hours of darkness, even 

 in midsummer, seem painfull)' long. In the Bad Lands proper we are 

 not often bothered very seriously by these winged pests ; but in the low 

 bottoms of the Big Missouri, and beside many of the reedy ponds and 

 great sloughs out on the prairie, they are a perfect scourge. During the 

 very hot nights, when they are especially active, the bed-clothes make 

 a man feel absolutely smothered, and yet his only chance for sleep is 

 to wrap himself tightly up, head and all ; and even then some of the 

 pests will usually force their way in. At sunset I have seen the mos- 

 quitoes rise up from the land like a dense cloud, to make the hot, stifling 

 night one long torture ; the horses would neither lie down nor graze, 

 traveling restlessly to and fro till daybreak, their bodies streaked and 

 bloody, and the insects settling on them so as to make them all one color, 

 a uniform gray ; wdiile the men, after a few hours' tossing about in the 

 vain attempt to sleep, rose, built a little fire of damp sage brush, and thus 

 endured the misery as best they could until it was light enough to work. 



But if the weather is fine, a man will never sleep better nor more 

 pleasantly than in the open air after a hard day's work on the round-up ; 

 nor will an ordinary showier or gust of wind disturb him in the least, for 

 he simply draws the tarpaulin over his head and goes on sleeping. But 

 now and then we have a wind-storm that might better be called a whirl- 

 wind and has to be met very differently ; and tw'O or three days or nights 

 of rain insure the wetting of the blankets, and therefore shivering dis- 

 comfort on the part of the would-be sleeper. For two or three hours all 

 goes well ; and it is rather soothing to listen to the steady patter of the 

 great raindrops on the canvas. But then it will be found that a corner has 

 been left open through which the water can get in, or else the tarpaulin 

 will begin to leak somewhere ; or perhaps the water will have collected 

 in a hollow underneath and have begun to soak through. Soon a little 

 stream trickles in, and every effort to remedy matters merely results in a 

 change for the worse. To move out of the way insures getting wet in a 

 fresh spot ; and the best course is to lie still and accept the evils that 

 have come with what fortitude one' can. Even thus, the first night a man 

 can sleep pretty w ell ; but if the rain continues, the second night, wdien 

 the blankets are already damp, and when the water comes through more 

 easily, is apt to be most unpleasant. 



Of course, a man can take little spare clothing on a round-up ; at the 

 very outside two or three clean handkerchiefs, a pair of socks, a change 

 of underclothes, and the most primitive kind of wa.shing-apparatus, all 



