Each hunter carried in his ammunition-box a reloading outfit, consisting of bullet molds, primer extractor, swedge, tamper, patch-paper, and lubricator. After reloading the shells we went to bed and to sleep.
I awoke the next morning rested, and eager for the hunt. I had thought when coming in with the hides to the camp the evening before that I would have to give up the job. But if anything I was now more anxious than ever to go on the hunt. Buck and his father went up on the little hill to look the country over, while I was hitching up the team. When they came back they reported that a few buffaloes were, in sight, in scattering bands, and that a few were close to camp. Buck advised me to not hitch up at present and said: "I wish you would cut four strong forks and four cross-arms [giving me the dimensions], drive the forks into the ground here [indicating the place], and when we come into camp to-night I'll fasten a hide inside the frame and we will have a vat to salt the humps in so we can dry them."
Alas! for plans. Before I had gotten quite through the work assigned me, I heard shooting up the coulée, five or six shots in rapid succession.
A short interval and boom! boom! again; and when he had fired about twenty rounds, at longer or shorter intervals, here there came down and out of the coulée, about thirty head of old stub-horn bulls, going at their lumbering, nodding gait, passing to within 100 feet of where our camp was.
I was near the wagon; the Enfield was in the front end of it, and the cartridge-belt around my waist. I hurried for the gun, put in a cartridge, and ran out toward them, dropping my right knee on the ground, took aim at the leader, and gave him a paunch shot ranging forward. Then I saw the rear of the herd was being followed by one with its right front leg broken and flapping. I aimed at him at the regulation place that I had heard Buck, George and the old man Wood say was the proper place to hit a buffalo with a side shot, which would be a place anywhere inside of a circle as large as a cowboy's hat, just back of the shoulderblade. And here was where I plunked him, and in much less time than it takes to tell it, the pale, frothy blood blubbered out of his nostrils, he made a few lurches and fell over—dead.
By this time the one I had "paunched" fell out to the left and stopped, while the rest seemed to increase their speed, with that characteristic motion, loping and bowing their great foreheads, their chin mops of long hair fairly sweeping the ground as their heads came down, in their up-and-down motion. They all passed on out of range of the Enfield, and the first one I had shot lay down on his hunkers and died in that position.
Soon Buck came riding out of the coulée and reported that he had killed four buffaloes and broken one's leg that had got away.
"Not much he didn't," said his wife; "Mr. Cook killed him with the old needle-gun," which term was used to designate all trap-door breech-blocks, "and another besides," she added. He had not yet seen the carcasses, although they were lying in plain sight on the short grass, the farthest one not more than 200 yards away.
When he saw them and me with the old gun yet in my hands, he said, "Well, I'll be darned! I've threatened to throw that old gun away several times, but I'm glad, now, I didn't."
We took the team and drove up the coulée to where the first bull had been killed, keeping the other three he had killed in sight. As we passed them Buck remarked that "these old stub-horns are harder to skin than cows," which we had the day before, "and I thought I'd help you with them, as I saw that you were pretty near played out yesterday."