"It must be as bad as a prairie fire."
"Worse, my lad; ever so much worse. You can see a prairie fire fifty miles away—more nor that at night, ever so much—and you have plenty of time to set the grass afire ahead of you, and clear the ground afore it comes up, though it does travel, when the wind is blowing, much faster than a horse can gallop. I have seen it go thirty miles an hour, the flames just leaping out ahead of it and setting grass alight a hundred yards before the main body of the fire came up. I tell you it is a terrible sight when the grass has just dried, and is breast-high; but, as I say, there ain't no cause to be afraid if you do but keep your head. You just pulls up a band of grass a couple of feet wide, and lights it ahead of you; the wind naturally takes it away from you, and you look sharp with blanket or leggings to beat it down, and prevent it working back agin the wind across the bit of ground you have stripped. As it goes it widens out right and left, and you have soon got a wide strip cleared in front of you. In course you don't go on to it as long as you can help it, not till you are drove by the other fire coming up; that gives it time to cool a bit. If you must go on soon, owing to being pressed, or from the fire you have lit working round agin the wind—as it will do if the grass is very dry—the best plan is to cut up your leggings, or any bit of hide you have got with you, the rawer the better, and wrap them round your horse's feet and legs; but it ain't often necessary to do that, as it don't take long for the ashes to cool enough so as to stand on."
Fortunately a bottom with good grass had been found close at hand to the place where they encamped, and when the caravan proceeded the draft oxen were all the better for their two days' rest.
"We shall have to begin to look out pretty sharp for Injin signs," Abe said, as they started early next morning. "Fresh meat is good, but we can do without it; there's enough pork and jerked meat in the waggons to last pretty nigh across the plains; but we are getting where we may expect Injins in earnest. We might, in course, have met 'em anywhere, but as they know the caravans have all got to come across their ground, it don't stand to reason as they would take the trouble to travel very far east to meet 'em. I don't say as we won't knock down a stag, now and agin, if we comes across 'em, but the less firing the better. We have been hunting up till now, but we must calculate that for the rest of the journey we are going to be hunted; and if we don't want our scalps taken, not to talk of all these women and children, we have got to look out pretty spry. I reckon we can beat them off in anything like a fair fight—that is, provided we have got time to get ready before they are on us, and it depends on us whether we do have time or not."
CHAPTER XI.
HOW DICK LOST HIS SCALP.
