Their spears pointed with sharpened deer-horns and tomahawks made of hard flint were not very dangerous, but they used them with wonderful skill. We burst through these, however, in the twinkling of an eye. I took one prisoner, a sturdy rascal, whose hatchet and arm I broke in the moment of fighting with hatchets. We seized a few tens of horses, but so wild and vicious that there was no use in them. We made a few prisoners, all wounded. I gave command to care for these most attentively, and set them free afterward at Lillian’s request, having given them blankets, arms, and horses, necessary for men seriously wounded. These poor fellows, believing that we would tie them to stakes for torture, had begun to chant their monotonous death-songs, and were simply terrified at first by what had happened. They thought that we would liberate only to hunt them in Indian fashion; but seeing that no danger threatened, they went away, exalting our bravery and the goodness of “Pale Flower,” which name they had given Lillian. That day ended, however, with a sad event, which cast a shade on our delight at such a considerable victory, and its foreseen results. Among my men there were none killed; a number, nevertheless, had received wounds more or less serious; the most grievously wounded was Henry Simpson, whose eagerness had borne him away during battle. In the evening his condition grew so much worse, that he was dying; he wished to make some confession to me, but, poor fellow, he could not speak, for his jaw had been broken by a tomahawk. He merely muttered: “Pardon, my captain!” Immediately convulsions seized him. I divined what he wanted, remembering the bullet which in the morning had whistled at my ear, and I forgave him, as becomes a Christian. I knew that he carried with him to the grave a deep, though unacknowledged feeling for Lillian, and supposed that he might have sought death. He died about midnight; we buried him under an immense cottonwood, on the bark of which I carved out a cross with my knife. [Illustration] [Illustration: CHAPTER V] ON the following day we moved on. Before us was a prairie still more extensive, more level, wilder, a region which the foot of a white man had hardly touched at that time,—in a word, we were in Nebraska. During the first days we moved quickly enough over treeless expanses, but not without difficulty, for there was an utter lack of wood for fuel. The banks of the Platte River, which cuts the whole length of those measureless plains, were, it is true, covered with a dense growth of osier and willow; but that river having a shallow bed, had overflowed, as is usual in spring, and we had to keep far away. Meanwhile we passed the nights at smouldering fires of buffalo dung, which, not dried yet sufficiently by the sun, rather smouldered with a blue flame than burnt. We hurried on then with every effort toward Big Blue River, where we could find abundance of fuel.