The meagre herbage of the prairie, promised nothing, in favour of a
hard and unyielding soil, over which the wheels of the vehicles
rattled as lightly as if they travelled on a beaten road; neither
wagons nor beasts making any deeper impression, than to mark that
bruised and withered grass, which the cattle plucked, from time to
time, and as often rejected, as food too sour, for even hunger to
render palatable.

Whatever might be the final destination of these adventurers, or the
secret causes of their apparent security in so remote and unprotected
a situation, there was no visible sign of uneasiness, uncertainty, or
alarm, among them. Including both sexes, and every age, the number of
the party exceeded twenty.

At some little distance in front of the whole, marched the individual,
who, by his position and air, appeared to be the leader of the band.
He was a tall, sun-burnt, man, past the middle age, of a dull
countenance and listless manner. His frame appeared loose and
flexible; but it was vast, and in reality of prodigious power. It was,
only at moments, however, as some slight impediment opposed itself to
his loitering progress, that his person, which, in its ordinary gait
seemed so lounging and nerveless, displayed any of those energies,
which lay latent in his system, like the slumbering and unwieldy, but
terrible, strength of the elephant. The inferior lineaments of his
countenance were coarse, extended and vacant; while the superior, or
those nobler parts which are thought to affect the intellectual being,
were low, receding and mean.

The dress of this individual was a mixture of the coarsest vestments
of a husbandman with the leathern garments, that fashion as well as