"This red handkerchief around my neck will do for a flag. But there's nothing to tie it to except our two guns, and if it succeeds we ought to use them for another purpose."
"Why, here," said Jack, "I'll take this rod from my rifle and we can tie the flag to that."
Jack's rifle was fitted with tubes below the barrel and through these ran the slender steel rod which might be used to drive out a shell, if by any chance one should stick in the breech of the gun.
Jack took the rod from its place and tied Donald's handkerchief to one end and then slowly raised it in the air and waved it in plain sight of the antelope. For a short time they did not notice it, and then an old doe faced around toward the boys and stood there looking; and in a moment all of them were looking. Presently the old doe started off on a canter to get nearer to the flag. She galloped for forty or fifty yards, then stopped and looked. Then she turned and trotted off a short distance, and turned and looked again; and then galloped up still nearer. And what this old doe did all the others did. Presently it seemed as if the buck took courage—as if perhaps he wanted to show off before his family. He galloped up to within seventy-five or eighty yards, and then, turning to the left, made as if he would circle around this strange thing that fluttered to the wind.
"Now!" whispered Jack. "He may not come any nearer. If you can, hit him when he is trotting; or, if you'll wait for him to stop, I believe you can get him. I think I would wait; he'll probably stop before he has gone far."
So it turned out. Before long the buck stopped and faced squarely around, and Donald, with the memory of the previous night's shooting in his mind, drew a very fine sight on the antelope's chest, low down, and fired. The buck reared on his hind legs and, holding his fore legs stiffly out before him, fell over backward. The does looked at him for a moment and then scurried off like so many frightened rabbits, while the boys, rising from the ground, stretched their cramped limbs and stamped about to restore the circulation.
"That was another good shot, Donald. I'd like to know how you held, and we'll see just where the ball hit."
"I drew the sight just as fine as I possibly could, and held on the very lower edge of his breast. If the ball flew as high as last night it seems to me it ought to have broken the lower part of his neck, but if I held right, and the life line is as low as I fancy you say it is, I believe that I must have hit his heart."
When they reached the buck, they found that Donald had done just that. The ball had entered an inch and a half or two inches above the lower level of the breast, and a little to one side of the breast-bone; had pierced the heart and gone entirely through the antelope.
Jack shook hands with Donald.