"Yes," said Jack, "I expect that's all we could have done. I guess we could have dodged him there, but I'm glad we didn't have to try it."
The boys rose to their feet and went to the place where the buffalo had come up on the prairie, and looking down over the almost vertical cliff, they wondered how such a great and heavy beast could ever have climbed up.
"I tell you," said Jack, "they must be strong. Just think of that big animal climbing up the steep face of that bluff. I should have thought he'd have fallen over backward and rolled down every time he tried to take a step. It's wonderful."
"Oh!" said Joe, "I tell you a buffalo is a great, powerful beast. He's strong and he never gets tired, and he's big, and then besides all that he has got mysterious power. Maybe you don't believe that, but all the old men will tell you it's so."
"Well," said Jack, "I've heard something about that from Hugh, but of course I don't know anything except what I've been told; but Hugh says that all the Indians believe the buffalo has this power."
"Well," said Joe, "it's so; he has."
They set out to return to their horses, walking along over the prairie near where it broke off into the deep ravines running toward the river. As they were crossing one of the little side gullies that ran into one of these, Jack's eye was caught by an odd sparkle in the sand on the floor of the ravine, and looking a second time, he saw something that did not shine quite like a bit of gravel. He stepped toward it and saw sticking out of the sand in the wash, a bit of yellow metal, and stooping down, pulled from the soil what he took at first to be a used cartridge shell. In a moment he saw that it was not this, and calling Joe to him, said, "What can this be, Joe? I thought it was an old cartridge shell, but it isn't, it looks like a little brass whistle with the mouth part gone. You see this hole through the metal at the bottom, there has been a string through that to hold it by." Joe looked at the piece of metal which was a short tube closed at one end, and with a projection at that end, which, as Jack said, had a hole in it and had evidently served to tie the tube to something. "Why," said he, "that's a powder charger. I never saw one made of brass before, but I've seen lots made of horn and tin and copper. You fill this charger with powder from your horn, and empty it into your gun; that's the way you measure the charge."
"Oh yes," said Jack, "I've heard of that, but I never saw one before, but look here," he added, "here is something scratched on it. What is it?" And he rubbed the dust away with his finger and polished the metal on his sleeve. "Why! it's 'B. L.,' those must be the initials of the man who owned it; but I wonder how it came to be here. I suppose the man was hunting or travelling about, and the string broke and he lost it, and then finally it got washed into the gulch here."
"Yes," said Joe, "most likely that was it."