Hardly less trying were the days of dust-storms. What misery it was when the wind blew from the front and the whole cloud of dust raised by over three hundred yoke of cattle, and the motion of sixty-five wagons drove in our faces! How intolerably our eyes and our nostrils burned, and how quickly our ears were filled with the flying sand or alkali! I should like to read once more, those diary entries. Was there anything written, I wonder, about those silhouettes upon the hills? What did it tell, if anything, about the alarm that was spread through our Company? Had we--the unlearned--known more about the ways of the Indian we would have realized that they--those shadows--were no Sioux. Yet it was disturbing to the unknowing to see those figures, those mysteriously moving horsemen of the night. Thank heaven! It was but our own scouting herdsmen. But for once, to those assembled within the corral centre, O, how too long seemed the hymn, and even the prayer! How impatient we were to know the truth. In "The Cedar Bluffs" the wagons that are sketched corralled are not our own. They comprised a small freight train, and right glad would they have been to, and most likely they did, creep along, as it were, in our wake. There were no women or children in that train, its members were all of the daring "freighter." These were men willing to meet with any danger. Perhaps there might be among them men inexperienced, but they must have possessed intrepid hearts. Rough of the rough, but daring they certainly were. Woe to that little band if later they met the Sioux. It would mean, for them, annihilation. What rude pranks the Indian did sometimes play! The Sioux or Cheyenne, he would take bales of bright stuffs which he sometimes found in the freighters' wagons, fasten one end of it to his pony and let the hundred yards unravel and flaunt on the winds as wildly he dashed across the plain. There was a brutally comic side to the character of the western Indian. A brutal side! Yes, and there was often a comic side to the white man's fear. Well, indeed, a friend of mine has told it. Twelve young men comprised a company; two wagons and six yoke of oxen made up their outfit. That certainly was taking their risks in those perilous times! Yet they were unmolested. Once, indeed, they thought themselves at the mercy of the Sioux; as truly, in another way they were. Death and the scalping-knife appeared their lot. But it was all a hoax. What had been taken for the painted savage was but a party of whites with blankets over their heads to keep away the rain. Taking into consideration the really dangerous position of the little band, there was a tragic-farcical touch in their list of arms. My friend's sole means of defense was a butcher-knife some six inches long.