It had been a hard task, though, to hold the horses—the poor creatures shivering with dread, and fighting hard to get free. The worst part of the adventure revealed itself to Bart a few moments later when he turned to look for Joses, whom he found rubbing his head woefully beside the traces of their fire, over which the bison had gone in enormous numbers, with the result that the embers had been scattered, and every scrap of the delicious, freshly-roasted, well-browned meat trampled into the sand.
“Never mind, Joses,” cried Bart, bursting out laughing; “there’s plenty more meat cut up.”
“Plenty more,” growled Joses; “and that all so nicely done. Oh, the wilful, wasteful beasts! As if there wasn’t room enough anywhere else on the plain without their coming right over us!”
“What does the Beaver mean?” said Bart just then.
“Mean? Yes; I might have known as much. He thinks there’s Injun somewhere; that they have been hunting the buffler and made ’em stampede. We shall have to be off, my lad. No breakfast this morning.”
It was as Joses said. The Beaver was of opinion that enemies must be near at hand, so he sent out scouts to feel for the danger, and no fire could be lighted lest it should betray their whereabouts to a watchful foe.
A long period of crouching down in the stream bed ensued, and as Bart waited he could not help thinking that their hiding-place in the plain was, as it were, a beginning of a canyon like that by the mountain, and might, in the course of thousands of years, be cut down by the action of flowing water till it was as wide and deep.
At last first one and then another scout came in, unable to find a trace of enemies; and thus encouraged, a fire was once more made and meat cooked, while the three bison slain that morning were skinned and their better portions cut away.
The sun was streaming down with all its might as they once more went off over the plain in search of the herd; and this search was soon rewarded, the party separating, leaving Bart, and Joses together to ride after a smaller herd about a mile to their left.
As they rode nearer, to Bart’s great surprise, the herd did not take flight, but huddled together, with a number of bulls facing outwards, presenting their horns to their enemies, tossing and shaking their shaggy heads, and pawing up the ground.