Both hunters dropped their guns and started out to cut the throats of their game, Joe was in the act of placing his hand on the neck of the one he had fired at, when, to his surprise, it jumped to its feet and ran off to join its not faraway companions, and the astonished boy never saw it again!
Which was the more surprised, the boy or the antelope, it would be difficult to determine. He turned to the savage, who was bewildered, too, and asked him what in the world was the cause of the animal's recovery after he had shot him.
"I aimed at his heart as he stood broadside toward me," said Joe, "and I don't know what it means."
"You only grazed him," answered White Wolf. "We Indians often catch wild horses in that way, when we can't get them in any other." Of course, they conversed in the Pawnee tongue, for the savage did not understand a word of English.
"Oh! I know what you mean, White Wolf," said Joe. "I just grazed his spinal cord with the ball; it paralyzed him for a moment, that's all. Yellow Calf told me how the Pawnees used to catch wild horses in that way, down on the Cimarron bottom, when the tribe lived on the Republican River."
"I'm soon going down there with some of my warriors. A Kaw brave told me the other day that there are a good many wild horses there yet; will you go, too?" asked White Wolf of his young friend.
"I'll go if my father and mother are willing, and I guess they will be," replied Joe. "I should so like to see a herd of wild horses. I have seen nearly all the other animals that live on the plains and in the timber, but have never seen wild horses, because they don't range as far east as Oxhide Creek. There are lots of them in Nebraska though, farther north, Mr. Tucker says."
As the prairie was too level for the hunters to hope to get near the antelope again, now that they had discharged their pieces, and as the other Indians were coming up to them, they decided to go back.