“Not now, my lad. There used to be, but they’ve been killed down a deal. You see the Injun lives on ’em a’most. He cuts up and dries the beef, and he makes himself buffler robes of the skins, and very nice warm things they are in cold parts up in the mountains. I don’t know what the Injun would do if it wasn’t for the buffler. He’d starve. Not as that would be so very much consequence, as far as some tribes goes—Comanches and Apachés, and them sort as lives by killing and murdering every one they sees. Halloa! what’s that mean?”
He pulled up, and shaded his eyes with his hand, to gaze at where one of the Indians was evidently making some sign with his spear as he sat in a peculiar way, right on their extreme left, upon an eminence in the plain.
Bart looked eagerly on, so as to try and learn what this signal meant.
“Oh, I know,” said Joses directly, as he saw the Beaver make his horse circle round. “He can see a herd far out on the plain, and the Beaver has just signalled him back; so ride on, my lad, and we may perhaps come across a big run of the rough ones before the day is out.”
Chapter Twenty Five.
Bart’s first Bison.
Joses was wrong, for no sign was seen of buffalo that day, and so the next morning, after a very primitive kind of camp out in the wilderness, the Beaver took them in quite a different direction, parallel to the camp, so as to be within range, for distance had to be remembered in providing meat for so large a company.
It was what Joses called ticklish work.