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 off, 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 
cf infuriated warriors howling on their trail back to the very 
