But, as the days passed by, they greatly feared that one of their number would never reach there; the baby boy grew worse. The cooling breezes that brought health to his weakly sister, seemed fraught with death for the lately blooming boy. Guy was greatly saddened by the sufferings of the child, and by the grief of its parents, and shuddered when he saw the bones of animals which lay by thousands bleaching upon the desert, and once was filled with horror on coming across a human skull, which the prairie wolves had dragged from some shallow grave, and separated far from its kindred bones. The idea that the body of the poor little baby should meet such a fate, filled him with sorrow, and although it had always seemed to him a natural and peaceful thing that the temple of clay should rest under its native dust, after the flight of the soul, he thought that the Indian mode of sepulture, of which they saw examples every day, by far the best.
Very often they saw a curious object in the distance, and two of the party, riding forward to examine it, would report an Indian place of burial. Guy had himself gone forward once and found, to his surprise, two forked poles, some six or eight feet high, supporting something wrapped in a blanket. This something was a dead Indian, who in this strange position, with his weapons in his hands, was waiting his summons to the "happy hunting grounds."
On his return to the train, Guy hastened to find Aggie, to tell her of what he had seen. She was listening very attentively, when George ran up, exclaiming: "Look at the rats! there are thousands of rats on the plains!"
Aggie looked in the direction indicated by her brother, and crying: "Oh, the dreadful rats," was about to run away, when Guy stopped her, telling her, laughingly, that they were the wonderful little prairie dogs, of which they had heard so much.
Truly enough when she gained courage to look at the little animals, she saw that although they at first sight resembled rats, on closer inspection they appeared even more like squirrels. The children were greatly entertained by watching their quick, active movements, as they darted about through the low grass. A very busy community they appeared to be, and with plenty to gossip about. To Aggie's delight Guy pretended to translate their quick, chirruping barks into our own language. Some he said were telling how a monster rattlesnake had come to visit them without any invitation, and that the only food he would eat, was the youngest and fattest of their families; and that their constant intruders, the owls, had the same carnivorous tastes, besides which they rendered themselves particularly disagreeable, by standing in the doors and staring at every dog that went by, and even preventing the entrance of visitors, to the great distress of all the belles and beaux in town.
All this may have been very true, for the excited little creatures talked so continuously that I am sure they must have had some grievance, and the children thought it must be the owls that stood solemnly at the entrance of many of the burrows. They did not see the rattlesnakes, so even Aggie somewhat doubted the tales of their ferocity, which Guy said the little prairie dogs related.
But although these little creatures were such chatterers, they appeared very industrious, for many hillocks of sand indicated where their homes were burrowed. Each little hole was occupied by a pair of dogs, one of which was often seen perched on the apex like a sentinel. But like many other sentinels, they appeared on the watch for danger, not to combat, but to avoid it, for they darted like a flash into their holes whenever a lean, prowling wolf stalked near them, or even a prairie hen flew by.
"I wish you would tell us a story about prairie dogs," said Aggie to Guy, that evening when they were gathered around the camp-fire.
"I am afraid it is impossible for me to do that," he replied, "for very little seems to be known about them. Naturalists have never paid much attention to them, curious as they are."
"But the Indians must know something about them," said Gus.