It was on the afternoon of this Sunday, that David started out to walk
to an Indian village, of which a passing emigrant had told him, lying
in a hollow a mile to the westward. He left the camp sunk in the
somnolence of its seventh-day rest, Susan not to be seen anywhere, Leff
asleep under the wagon, the doctor writing his diary in the shade of
the cotton-woods, and Daddy John lying on the grass among the whiteness
of the week's wash. The hour was hot and breathless, the middle
distance quivering through a heat haze, and the remoter reaches of the
prairie an opalescent blur.
The Indian village was deserted and he wandered through its scattered
lodges of saplings wattled with the peeled bark of willows. The
Indians had not long departed. The ash of their fires was still warm,
tufts of buffalo hair and bright scraps of calico were caught on the
bushes, yet it already had an air of desolation, the bleakness of the
human habitation when the dweller has crossed the threshold and gone.
Shadows were filling the hollow like a thin cold wine rising on the
edges of a cup, when he left it and gained the upper levels.
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