A picturesque group of some half-dozen oaks offered a good camping spot, and around it the wagons were placed for the night in a half-circle, the ends of the crescent resting each side of us upon the creek. The rule of the plains is, "In time of peace prepare for war." Northward from us, and distant perhaps fifty yards, rippled the clear waters of the Saline, which was then at a low stage. High above it was the table-land of the plains, and the edge of this, as far as we could trace it, was dotted with the dark forms of countless buffalo. So distant as to appear diminutive, their moving seemed like crawling, and the back-ground of light grass gave them much the appearance of bees upon a board. They were crowding up to the very edge of the valley of the Saline, from whence, as we were told, they extended back to the Solomon, thence to the Republican, and at intervals all the way northward to the remote regions of the Upper Missouri. Could the venerable Uncle Samuel go up in a balloon and take a thousand miles' view of his western stock region, he would perceive that his goodly herds of bison, some millions in number, feeding between the snows of the North and the flowers of the South, were waxing fat and multiplying. This latter fact might somewhat surprise him, when he discovered around his herd a steady line of fire and heard its continual snapping. The unsophisticated old gentleman would see train after train of railroad cars rustling over the plains, every window smoking with the bombardment like the port-holes of a man-of-war. He would see Upper Missouri steamers often paddling in a river black with the crossing herds, and pouring wanton showers of bullets into their shaggy backs. To the south Indians on horseback, to the north Indians on snow shoes, would meet his astonished gaze, and around the outskirts of the vast range his white children on a variety of conveyances, and all, savage and civilized alike, thirsting for buffalo blood. That the buffalo, in spite of all this, does apparently continue to increase, shows that the old and rheumatic ones, the veteran bulls which in bands and singly circle around the inner herds of cows and calves, are the ones that most commonly fall the easy victims to the hunters. Their day has passed, and powder and ball but give the wolves their bones to pick a little earlier.