All This Time He
Had Subsisted On Crickets And Lizards, Wild Onions, And Three Eggs
Which He Found In The Nest Of A Prairie Dove.
He had not seen a
human being.
Utterly bewildered in the boundless, hopeless desert
that stretched around him, offering to his inexperienced eye no mark
by which to direct his course, he had walked on in despair till he
could walk no longer, and then crawled on his knees until the bone
was laid bare. He chose the night for his traveling, lying down by
day to sleep in the glaring sun, always dreaming, as he said, of the
broth and corn cake he used to eat under his old master's shed in
Missouri. Every man in the camp, both white and red, was astonished
at his wonderful escape not only from starvation but from the grizzly
bears which abound in that neighborhood, and the wolves which howled
around him every night.
Reynal recognized him the moment the Indians brought him in. He had
run away from his master about a year before and joined the party of
M. Richard, who was then leaving the frontier for the mountains. He
had lived with Richard ever since, until in the end of May he with
Reynal and several other men went out in search of some stray horses,
when he got separated from the rest in a storm, and had never been
heard of up to this time. Knowing his inexperience and helplessness,
no one dreamed that he could still be living.
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