“I’ll follow him to the ends of the earth!” said Stevens; “and when I find him it’s his life or mine! This world ain’t big enough to hold the two of us from this on!” CHAPTER XXVII. THE SKY MIRROR. With the aid of torches, an effort was made to pick up the trail close by the fort. The scouts found some hoofmarks, and from them gained what they believed to be the general direction of Barlow’s flight. It was known, however, that Barlow was shrewd, and the chances were good that he would change his course after leaving the fort some distance behind him. When daylight came nothing was to be seen by the scouts but the broad expanse of prairie grass lying before them. In that section of country the grass is not the tall prairie grass of better-watered regions; but it is the short “buffalo grass,” growing but an inch or two high. It is fine and mossy in texture and of a gray-green in color, and when the land is clothed with it the traveler looks out on a gray-green expanse that widens before him like a limitless carpet. Here and there a few “groves,” or patches of mesquite, a bush of the size of a small peach tree, broke the otherwise illimitable sweep of the eye. Besides these breaks of mesquite there were, as the scouts knew, innumerable swales and “draws.” These were low land, some being grassy depressions but a few yards in diameter, others of much greater extent. In addition, and resembling them, were the old “buffalo wallows,” depressions which the buffaloes had gouged out with their heads and horns in the rainy seasons in their efforts to rid themselves of mosquitoes and other insects. The two scouts and their young companion sat quietly on their horses and saw the sun rise out of this grassy sea like a ball of red fire. It was truly a glorious sight. “Nothing down Panhandle way,” said Wild Bill, as he looked southward into Texas--that portion of Texas known as the “Panhandle.” “And nothing over toward No Man’s Land,” said Buffalo Bill. “No Man’s Land,” it may be said, is that extension of the Indian Territory stretching between the Panhandle of Texas and western Kansas. It was formerly a possession of the Cherokee Indians, and was called the “Cherokee Outlet,” or “The Neutral Strip.” Over it the Cherokees were privileged to pass from their reservation eastward to the hunting grounds of the West. In later years, being a neglected and forsaken country, with little pretensions to an exercise of legal authority, it became the resort of desperadoes of all sorts and degrees, and was known as “No Man’s Land.” In it were a few towns with no recognized legal standing, some cattle companies that were really lawbreakers by being there, and certain Indians herded on reservations. To these must be added outlaws and “bad men” generally of the kind that infested the frontier.