Next morning they were astir by daybreak; and after breakfasting heartily, they saddled their horses, and resumed their journey.
Chapter Ten.
The Food of the Silkworm.
After leaving Bayou Crocodile, our young hunters travelled due west, over the prairies of Opelousas. They did not expect to fall in with buffalo on these great meadows. No. The bison had long since forsaken the pastures of Opelousas, and gone far westward. In his place thousands of long horned cattle roamed over these plains; but these, although wild enough, belonged to owners, and were all marked and tended by mounted herdsmen. There were white settlements upon the prairies of Opelousas, but our adventurers did not go out of their way to visit them. Their purpose was to get far beyond; and they did not wish to lose time.
They crossed numerous bayous and rivers, generally running southward into the Mexican Gulf. The shallow ones they forded, while those that were too deep for fording, they swam over upon their horses. They thought nothing of that—for their horses, as well as the mule Jeanette and the dog Marengo, were all trained to swim like fishes.
After many days’ travel they reached the banks of the river Sabine, which divides Louisiana from Texas, then a part of the Mexican territory. The face of the country was here very different from most of that they had passed over. It was more hilly and upland; and the vegetation had altogether changed. The great dark cypress had disappeared, and pines were more abundant. The forests were lighter and more open.
There was a freshet in the Sabine; but they swam across it, as they had done other rivers, and halted to encamp upon its western bank. It was still only a little after noon, but as they had wet their baggage in crossing, they resolved to remain by the river for the rest of the day. They made their camp in an open space in the midst of a grove of low trees. There were many open spaces, for the trees stood wide apart, and the grove looked very much like a deserted orchard. Here and there a tall magnolia raised its cone-shaped summit high above the rest, and a huge trunk of one of these, without leaves or branches, appeared at some distance, standing like an old ruined tower.
The ground was covered with flowers of many kinds. There were blue lupins and golden helianthi. There were malvas and purple monardas, and flowers of the cotton-rose, five inches in diameter. There were blossoms of vines, and creeping plants, that twined around the trees, or stretched in festoons from one to another—the cane-vine with its white clusters, and the raccoon grape, whose sweet odours perfumed the air; but by far the most showy were the large blossoms of the bignonia, that covered the festoons with their trumpet-shaped corollas, exhibiting broad surfaces of bright scarlet.