On a warm day we had been riding without a halt over desolate, stony hills, and were quite exhausted. When our tired and thirsty horses clambered up a barren height, we suddenly looked down into a lovely valley covered with fresh verdure, through which a broad stream wound. The view soon enlivened horse and rider, and we merrily hurried down to the bank of the stream. We had hardly reached it and ridden our horses in to let them quench their thirst, when a long train of Indians appeared on the opposite height bordering the valley and came straight toward us. Tiger looked at them for a moment, and told us to wait here while he rode across to see who they were. We dismounted, led our horses together, and got our weapons in readiness. Tiger galloped through the valley to the hill side down which the Indians were coming, and checked his piebald at its foot. We saw him making signs from a distance to the approaching horsemen, which were answered in the same way, and ere long the whole party pulled up around him. They held a long consultation and then rode toward us with Tiger at their head. They were Kickapoos out on a hunting expedition, and had recently left their villages on the Platte, where they have settlements like the Delawares, and their squaws and old men grow crops and breed cattle. I had a long conversation with the chief, in which Tiger played the interpreter, told him the purpose of our journey, invited him to visit me on the Leone next winter, and asked him how far it was to the next water. He assured me that we should come to good water and grass before the sun sank behind the mountains, and so we parted, very glad to get away from the fellows, whose appearance was anything but satisfactory. The party consisted of about eighty men, twenty squaws, and a number of small children. The first were dressed in deer-hide breech-clouts, and had round the body a leathern belt, through which a very long and broad strip of coarse red cloth was passed, whose two ends were pulled through between the legs and fastened into the belt behind. In addition, several of them had deerskin coats, others calico coats, but the majority merely wore a buffalo robe over their bare shoulders, and nearly all were armed with rifles. The squaws wore a short leathern petticoat round their loins, and a buffalo robe on their shoulders, while those who had infants carried them fastened to a board upon their backs. They had already unpacked their horses and prepared their camp to halt here, as we rode away from them over the hills, and Tiger came up to me, saying, "Kickapoo no good--two tongues." I had heard before that these Indians were false, spiteful, and hostile to white men, and only the advantage they derive from being on friendly terms with the United States induces them not to appear publicly as their enemies.