To our delight, General Sheridan's old war-scout, Mr. Campbell, rode in with letters at dusk, and we had the happiness to learn that our long absence had made ill news for none of us. By six next day we were up and away to see the great Crow camp, which we reached by crossing a long ford of the swift Big Horn River. There were one hundred and twenty lodges, about one thousand Crows, about two thousand dogs and as many ponies. I think it was the commissary who dared to say that every dog could not have his day among the Crows, as there would not be enough days to go round; but surely never on earth was such a canine chorus. It gave one a respect for Crow nerves. Let me add, as a Yankee, my veneration for the Crow as a bargainer, and you will have the most salient ideas I carried away from this medley of dogs, horses, sullen, lounging braves with pipes, naked children warmly clad with dirt, hideous squaws, skin lodges, medicine-staffs gay with bead and feathers, and stenches for the describing of which civilized language fails. Crossing a branch of the Big Horn, we rode away again over these interminable, lonely grass-plains; past the reaping-machines and the vast wagons, with a dozen pairs of oxen to each, sent out to gather forage for the winter use of the fort; past dried-up streams, whitewashed with snowy alkaline deposits, cheating the eye at a distance with mockery of foaming water. Still, mile on mile, across rolling lands, with brief pause at the river to water horses, scaring the gay little prairie-dogs and laughing at the swift scuttle away of jack-rabbits, until by noon the long lines of Custer came into sight. These three days of sudden descent from high levels to the terrible monotony of the thirsty plains, without shade, with the thermometer still in the nineties, began to show curiously in the morale of the outfit. The major got up earlier and rode farther: our English captain walked more and more around the camp-fire. On one day the coffee gave out, and on the next the sugar, and everything except the commissary's unfailing good-humor, which was, unluckily, not edible. Mr. T. rode in silence beside the judge, grimly calculating how soon he could get a railroad over these plains. Even the doctor fell away in the "talk" line. Says Mr. Jump: "These 'ere plains ain't as social as they might be." Some one is responsible for the following brief effort to evolve in verse the lugubrious elements of a ride over alkali plains with failing provender, weary horses, desiccating heat and quenchless thirst: