Chap. VI. A FUGITIVE MURDERER. 279 
and after this to have himself rubbed hard. The remedy 
was completely successful. The wind suddenly shifted 
from the north, and a very close south wind succeeded, 
the change causing dizziness and vomiting in several of 
our people. I found throughout the whole journey that 
a southerly wind invariably produced a disagreeable and 
often injurious effect on the body. Even north of the 
Arkansas, during such a warm wind, one of our drivers, a 
tall and strong-built blue-eyed Kentuckian, fell senseless 
and in convulsions on the ground as I was walking by his 
side and speaking with him. I bled him, by which he 
recovered. 
Whilst encamped by this pool we saw a single horse- 
man come up to us across the plain ; he dismounted and 
claimed hospitality. During his stay he confided to us 
the fact that he had shot a man in New Mexico, and had, 
in consequence, been obliged to fly. It requires desperate 
resolution to travel from New Mexico to Missouri alone ; 
this man, however, had a horse and a gun. We repeatedly 
met, at different points of our journey, deserters from the 
forts of New Mexico, who had travelled on foot for many 
hundred miles over the wilderness alone and unarmed. 
Some of them had subsisted for weeks together on locusts, 
lizards and frogs, before we supplied them with provisions. 
The further we advanced the more sterile the plateau 
became and the harder the soil, which, as far as the eye 
reached, presented a perfectly level plain. Proceeding 
over a tract of loose sand, we came to Sand Creek, the bed 
of which was dry, and on the further side the soil was 
again hard and level. The stratum of hard clay always 
lies above the loose sand. 
Here I saw, for the first time, one of those large hairy 
spiders called tarantula by the Mexicans, but differing 
