The first curtain of fog uplifting, revealed rolling away five hundred feet beneath a brown barren, that ghastly compound of spongy ashes, yielding sand, and soilless, soulless earth, on which even greasewood cannot grow, and sage-brush sickens and dies--the "_mauvaises terres_" of the French missionaries and fur-traders--the curt "bad lands" of the Plains vernacular, the meanest country under the sun. A second curtain, rising farther away to the slow music of muttered profanity from the audience, revealed only worse and more of it. The third curtain exposed the same rolling barren miles to the southward. The fourth reached away to the very horizon, and vouchsafed not a glimpse of the longed-for Hills, nor a sign of the needed succor. Hope died from hungry eyes, and strong men turned away with stifled groans. One or two of us there were who knew that, long before we got sight of the Black Hills, we must pass the Sioux landmark of "Deer's Ears"--twin conical heights that could be seen for miles in every direction, and even they were beyond range of my field-glasses. My poor horse, ugly, raw-boned, starved, but faithful "Blatherskite," was it in wretched premonition of your fate, I wonder, that you added your equine groan to the human chorus? You and your partner, "Donnybrook," were ugly enough when I picked you out of the quartermaster's herd at Fort Hays the night we made our sudden start for the Sioux campaign. You had little to recommend you beyond the facility with which you could rattle your heels like shillalahs about the ribs of your companions--a trait which led to your Celtic titles--but you never thought so poorly of your rider as to suppose that, after you had worn yourselves down to skin and bone in carrying him those bleak two thousand miles, he would help eat you; but he did--and it seemed like cannibalism.