"What do you think we'd better do, Boyd," asked Brady. "If we keep going we'll find the herd crossing our path, and it will be no use fur us to try to break through it." "We can move on until we come close up," replied the hunter, "and then wait for the herd to go by. Maybe we might strike a clump of trees in which we could camp. Pick out the country with your glasses, Will, and see if you can find any trees on our side of the moving buffalo line." Will, after much searching, was able to identify the tops of some trees standing in a dip where, sheltered from the winds that blew unceasingly, they had been able to obtain good size. "We'll ride fur 'em," said Boyd. "There may be a pool of water in the dip, too." "But won't the buffaloes stop and drink it up?" asked Will. "No, they're bearing straight ahead, looking neither to the right nor to the left, going I've no idea where." "Two million hearts that beat as one," said Will. They reached the dip in due time, finding it a shallow depression of a half acre, well grown with substantial cottonwoods and containing, as they had surmised, a pool of good water, perhaps twenty feet each way, and two feet deep. Here the animals drank freely, enabling them to save the store they carried for more stringent times, and then all rested among the trees, while myriads of buffaloes thundered by. Hour after hour they marched past, not a single one stopping for the water and deep grass they must have smelled so near. At times, they were half hidden by the vast cloud of dust in which they moved, and which was of their own making, and at other times the wind of the plains blew it away, revealing the lowered heads and huge black forms, pressing on with some sort of instinct to their unknown destination. Will watched them a long time and the tremendous sight at last laid a spell upon him. Apparently they had no leaders. What power moved them out of a vast and unknown region into another region, alike vast and unknown? Leaderless though they were, they advanced like the columns of an army and with a single purpose. He climbed into a fork of one of the cottonwoods and used his glasses once more. First he looked into the northwest, where they were going, and he could not now see the head of the shaggy army or of the dust column that hung above it, as both had passed long since under the horizon. And looking into the southeast he could not see, either, the end of the coming army or of its dust cloud. It emerged continually from under the rim of the horizon, and there was such an effect of steadiness and permanency that it seemed to the lad as if that vast column, black and wide, would be coming on forever.