Bang! went the rifle, as he pressed the trigger.
Thad had his double-barreled gun in readiness, and could have supplemented the shot of Step Hen by pouring in a broadside of small bullets that must have dropped the animal in his tracks. But he refrained, for his instinct seemed to tell him that the missile from Step Hen’s little rifle had struck home, as the buck gave a convulsive leap, and pitched over; and Thad knew how much a new beginner in the game delights in the knowledge that he has accomplished the work of bringing down a deer unassisted.
True, the buck managed to scramble to its feet again, and run; but even then the patrol leader held his fire, for he knew that the animal could not go more than a hundred or two feet before it must drop.
“I rung the bell then, Thad; didn’t you hear me?” almost shrieked Step Hen, so excited that he never once thought of pumping the exploded cartridge from the firing chamber of his repeating rifle, and sending a fresh one in after it; and then, as the stricken buck scrambled to his feet again, and went off at a wobbling gait the astonished and dismayed Step Hen, who should have been prepared to send in another shot on his own account, actually forgot that he held a rifle calculated to repeat, and wildly besought his chum to fire.
“Oh! there he’s going to get away after all, Thad!” he cried, jumping up and down in his excitement; “why don’t you blaze away, and knock my buck over? Thad, oh, do let him have it good and hard! There, now he’s gone, and we’ve lost him! It’s a shame, that’s what it is, when I so nearly got him. And he had six prongs too! Oh, me! oh, my! what tough luck!”
“Don’t worry, Step Hen,” said Thad, quickly; “that deer can’t get away. You shot him to pieces, and he’s just bound to drop before five minutes. We’ll just follow him up, and find him lying as dead as—”
Just what Thad had in mind as a comparison Step Hen never knew. Perhaps he was going to say “as dead as a door nail,” that being a favorite expression among the scouts; or it might be Thad meant to take a little flight into ancient history, and compare the condition of that buck inside of five minutes with the Julius Caesar of olden Roman times. It did not matter.
He was interrupted by a sudden loud explosion. The sound came from the quarter in which the buck had just gone, and could not have been far distant. And even the tenderfoot understood what it meant.
“Oh! listen to that, would you, Thad?” he burst forth with. “There’s somebody else hunting up in this neck of the woods, and they’ve got my fine buck! Now, ain’t that the worst thing ever; and just when it began to look as if he ought to belong to me, too; for you said he was hard hit; and I just know I rung the bell with that bullet. And now I reckon it’s all off. Oh! why didn’t you knock him over when you had the chance, Thad?”
“I sure would if I’d had the least suspicion that there was any other hunter around these diggings,” declared Thad, with a frown on his usually smooth brow; for he instantly began to scent trouble. “But come on, let’s start along, and see what it all means. Perhaps now old Eli, or Jim may have wandered out to take a little side hunt.”