“I couldn’t help it,” was the reply. “He cried so, and seemed to be in such misery.”
“Well, you beat anybody I ever heard of!” exclaimed the young officer, who could scarcely believe his ears. “You come out here on purpose to hunt game, and when you secure as fine a specimen as one can find in a year’s shooting, you must up and let it go because it cries!”
The lieutenant shouted out the last word at the top of his voice, and clapped his hands, and waved himself back and forth in the saddle, and laughed until Oscar was obliged to laugh too.
“That’s the way they all do,” continued the officer, as soon as he could speak. “You’ll have to get used to it.”
“I can’t, and I’ll not try,” was the emphatic rejoinder. “I’ll never chase another antelope on horseback, unless I am in danger of going hungry. Why, his forelegs were all cut to pieces!”
“That’s another thing they always do when they begin to get tired and are hard pressed. It is because they don’t pick up their forefeet fast enough to keep them out of the way of the hind ones. Well, we have seen all we shall see of this drive, and we’d better go back and find the others. The colonel will want to try the speed of his dogs now. You’ll not mind looking at a pretty race, I suppose?”
“I shall take no part in it,” answered Oscar. “If the colonel wants more antelope, why doesn’t he shoot them and be done with it?”
The lieutenant shrugged his shoulders as if to say that what the colonel did was something he could not answer for, and after that the two rode in silence, the officer now and then turning in his saddle to gaze in the direction in which the fawn had disappeared, and acting altogether as if he had half a mind to turn about and resume the pursuit on his own responsibility.
He believed in making as large a bag as he could when he went hunting, and the loss of the fawn troubled him not a little.
Oscar had almost decided to let the other captive go free also; but, when he reached the place where it had been left, he found that it was but slightly injured, not having been so long and perseveringly pushed as its mate; so he decided to keep it if he could, and take it back to the States with him.