A heavy line of large birds, black to the eye, beat on laboriously, alighted, and ran onward with incredible speed--the wild turkeys, fleeing the terror.

Came also broken bands of white-tailed deer, easy, elastic, bounding irregularly, looking back at the miles-wide cloud, which now and then spun up, black as ink toward the sky, but always flattened and came onward with the wind.
Danger?
Yes! Worse than Indians, for yonder were the cattle; there lay the parked train, two hundred wagons, with the household goods that meant their life savings and their future hope in far-off Oregon.

Women were there, and children--women with babes that could not walk.

True, the water lay close, but it was narrow and deep and offered no salvation against the terror now coming on the wings of the wind.
That the prairie fire would find in this strip fuel to carry it even at this green season of the grass the wily Pawnees had known.

This was cheaper than assault by arms.