Chapter 32 - Page 2

in the wagon
which contained her daughters; the young men took their customary
places among the cattle, or nigh the teams, and the whole proceeded,
at their ordinary, dull, but unremitted gait.

For the first time, in many a day, the squatter turned his back
towards the setting sun. The route he held was in the direction of the
settled country, and the manner in which he moved sufficed to tell his
children, who had learned to read their father's determinations in his
mien, that their journey on the prairie was shortly to have an end.
Still nothing else transpired for hours, that might denote the
existence of any sudden, or violent, revolution in the purposes or
feelings of Ishmael. During all that time he marched alone, keeping a
few hundred rods in front of his teams, seldom giving any sign of
extraordinary excitement. Once or twice, indeed, his huge figure was
seen standing on the summit of some distant swell, with the head bent
towards the earth, as he leaned on his rifle; but then these moments
of intense thought were rare, and of short continuance. The train had
long thrown its shadows towards the east, before any material
alteration was made in the disposition of their march. Water-courses
were waded, plains were passed, and rolling ascents risen and
descended, without producing the smallest change. Long practised in
the difficulties of that peculiar species of travelling in which he
was engaged, the squatter avoided the more impracticable obstacles of
their route by a sort of instinct, invariably inclining to the right
or left in season, as the formation of the land, the presence of
trees, or the signs of rivers forewarned him of the necessity of such
movements.

At length the hour arrived when charity to man and beast required a
temporary suspension of labour. Ishmael chose the required spot with
his customary sagacity. The regular formation of the country, such as
it has been described in the earlier pages of our book, had long been
interrupted by a more unequal and broken surface. There were, it is
true, in general, the same wide and empty wastes, the same rich and
extensive bottoms, and that wild and singular combination of swelling
fields and of nakedness. which gives that region the appearance of an
ancient country, incomprehensibly stripped of its people and their
dwellings. But these distinguishing features of the rolling prairies
had long been interrupted by irregular hillocks, occasional masses of
rock, and broad belts of forest.

Ishmael chose a spring, that broke out of the base of a rock some
forty or fifty feet in elevation, as a place well suited to the wants
of his herds. The water moistened a small swale that lay beneath the
spot, which yielded, in return for