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 over-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 sufficiént 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 
