The visitors had with them a quantity of dried meat and roots which they wanted to trade with us for bread or for blankets; but our store of provisions was not so low that we would willingly eat what those creatures had prepared.
They lingered around the encampment, however, coming as closely to the wagons as our people would permit, and we girls and boys were told to keep careful watch lest they steal all our possessions.
Just at sunset, one of the men who was standing guard over the cows shouted that a wild beast was creeping up on us from a thicket a short distance away, to the right of where father's wagon stood.
Looking up quickly, I saw a huge panther crawling, as you might say, much as a cat approaches a mouse, and it seemed to me that he was making ready to spring directly upon us girls.
Ellen and I clambered shrieking into the wagon, where we hid our heads in a feather bed like the silly children we were, and straightway there ensued the greatest tumult that can be imagined, as our hunters strove to kill the ferocious animal.
It is, perhaps, needless for me to say that the panther escaped, although Eben Jordan claimed it would have been possible for him to kill the beast, had he not been hampered by frightened girls and men.
A SCARCITY OF FOOD
When the march was taken up once more, we journeyed over a less forbidding, although a not very pleasant, country, seeing antelopes at a distance, but so wild that even Eben Jordan strove in vain to bring one down.
During four or five days we marched westward, seeing now and then great numbers of animals which would have served to provide us with fresh meat, but our men were unable to kill any; then we found our supply of food growing so small that it was decided each person should have at a single meal no more than one slice of bacon and a piece of corn bread as big as a man's hand.