Lost with Lieutenant Pike / How from the Pawnee Village the boy named Scar Head marched with the young American Chief clear into the Snowy Mountains; how in the dead of winter they searched for the Lost River and thought that they had found it; and how the Spanish Soldiery came upon them and took them down to Santa Fé of New Mexico, where another surprise awaited them

by Edwin L. Sabin

“You’ll likely stay out, in the hills, sir, you mean?”

“That depends on the day’s luck,” smiled the doctor. “But even if we do, we’ll be no worse off than Lieutenant Pike and Miller and Mountjoy. We’re all rationed the same, and there’s little to choose between camping together and camping separately.”

But even Stub felt the seriousness of it when again he followed the doctor and Baroney, for the second day’s hunt. If nothing was killed to-day, then to-morrow they would begin to starve; pretty soon they would be eating the horses, and next their moccasins, and without horses and moccasins they would die before getting out of the mountains.

XIII
MEAT FOR THE CAMP

Buffalo!

Stub stared hard. He scarcely could believe his bleared, aching eyes. Was it really true? Buffalo? Now what to do?

This was early in the third morning after leaving the main camp. For two days he and the doctor and Baroney had been hunting, hunting, from dawn to dark; ranging up and down, among the hills and draws, and wading the snow, on only one small meal. In fact, they practically had had nothing at all to eat, in forty-eight hours. Through the two nights they had tended fire and shiveringly dozed, without blankets, in the best spot they might find, where they could secure a little protection from the biting wind.

How they were going to keep on living if they discovered nothing to eat, this day, he did not know; Baroney did not know; the doctor hadn’t said. But they had told the sergeant not to expect them unless with good news; the other men probably were famishing, too, and they themselves might as well starve in one place as another.