How vividly, when one is fairly embarked in any new enterprise, do the events of the first night impress one's imagination, and how indelibly do they fix themselves in the memory! Inside our tents all was clean and cheery, but as none of us were disposed to seek them before a late hour, we spent the evening around our camp-fires. Excitement, for the time, had overmastered our sense of fatigue. The Professor's notes were out, and, with his feet to the fire and a box for a desk, he looked more like the Arkansas traveler writing home, than the learned savan committing to paper the latest secrets wrung from nature. The remainder of our party were scattered promiscuously around the fire, some seated on logs and boxes, the others outstretched upon the grass. Tammany Sachem was the first to break the silence. "Fellow citizens," he exclaimed, "let's vagabondize!" Now, with our alderman, vagabondizing meant story telling, an accomplishment which we consider the especial forte of vagabonds. We all hailed this proposition gladly, for Buffalo Bill, stretched there before the fire, had much of plain lore stored in his active brain that we wished to draw out, and we at once seized the opportunity to ask about the black pacer we had seen during the afternoon, and his weird story of the bloody saddle. From Bill's narrative we gathered the following: Something over a year before the era of our expedition a train of government wagons left Fort Hays destined for Fort Harker, and the Indians being troublesome, some twenty soldiers were sent in the wagons, as a guard. A few hours later there passed through Hays City a man from the mountains riding a powerful black stallion, while his family, consisting of a young wife and her brother, occupied a covered wagon which followed close behind. The stranger determined to take advantage of the protection afforded by the government train, and the little party pushed out after it over the plains. The day was a sultry one in midsummer, the sun pouring down its flood of heat on the desolate surface of the expanse that spread away on all sides. The long train, a full mile from front to rear, dragged its slow length sluggishly along, the mules sleepily following the trail, while the teamsters and soldiers dozed in the covered wagons. A driver, who happened to be awake, saw in the distance a beautiful mirage, and in it, as he looked, strange objects, like mounted men, were bobbing up and down. But then he had often seen weeds and other small objects similarly transformed, by these wonderful illusions of the plains, and even he forgot the bobbing shadows and dozed away again on his seat.