She came over the hill as if running, and at its summit she appeared to stop as if looking for something afar off.

At that distance I could not tell whether she gazed backward, forward, to the left or the right, but it impressed me that she stood gazing backward over the route to the west along which she had come.

Then, it was plain, she began running down the gentle declivity toward me, and once she fell and either lay or sat on the ground for some time.

Presently, though, she got up, and began coming on more slowly, sometimes as if running, most of the time going from side to side of the road as if staggering--and finally she went out of my sight, dropping into a wide valley, to the bottom of which I could not see.

It was strange, as it appeared to me; this lone woman, the prairie, night, and the sense of trouble; but, I thought, like most queer things, it would have some quite simple explanation if one could see it close-by.
I made camp a few hundred yards from the road by a creek, along the banks of which grew many willows, and some little groves of box-elders and popples, which latter in this favorable locality grew eight or ten feet tall, and were already breaking out their soft greenish catkins and tender, quivering, pointed leaves: in one of these clumps I hid my wagon, and in the midst of it I kindled my camp-fire.