After considerable search, Little Rifle discovered a suitable hiding-place among the rocks, into which they crawled, and almost instantly dropped into a deep slumber, and when the glad sun came up over the mountains, Harry opened his eyes. As he turned his head to greet his companion, no Little Rifle was to be seen! The displaced bowlders showed that he had gone out. But whither?
Crawling cautiously out from his lodgings, Harry discovered a small, bubbling spring of cool, fresh water, from which he took a refreshing draught, concluding that he had taken occasion to reconnoiter, and would shortly put in an appearance.
“I hope he has gone off to scare up a breakfast,” he mused, as he sat down by the spring, “for I’m hungry enough to eat a raw Blackfoot— Helloa!”
He heard the crackling of undergrowth, and there, scarcely twenty feet distant, he saw one of the finest and plumpest of antelopes, coming toward the spring, evidently for the purpose of obtaining his “morning bitters.”
“Oh dear,” gasped the boy, as he fixed his eyes upon him, “if I only had my gun! I wonder if I can’t get near enough to knife him?”
The instant he moved, the delicate, graceful animal halted, threw back its head, and fixing it steadily upon him for a single second, wheeled about and made an affrighted plunge backward.
“There goes my breakfast,” growled the lad, “and I never had a meal travel so fast in all my life. Ha! what’s up now? He must have hit his toe against something!”
This exclamation was caused by the sudden tumbling of the animal, who, rolling all over in a heap, struggled up again, then fell, and then lay still.
The crack of a rifle, that now reached the ears of the boy, explained all; the animal had scarcely ceased his struggles, when Little Rifle emerged from the bushes.
“Bully for you!” shouted Harry, dashing forward the instant he saw him. “Don’t throw away his hoofs and horns, for I’m hungry enough to eat them too.”