“Ask me something easy,” he said; “it looks as if a round stone, or, rather, an egg-shaped one, had fallen and made that; but, if so, where is the stone?”
“It’s a footprint,” Buffalo Bill declared, when he had looked farther.
“An animal’s, then; no man ever had a foot as big as that.”
“Whatever made it,” the scout asserted, “went on across these rocks; for you can see here where pebbles were dislodged. This little stone was turned, too; the thing, man or animal, stepped on the end of it, and it flipped over as he lifted his foot and went on. That’s clear enough.”
It was, to men trained to close observation, as they were. The side of the small, flat, sharp-pointed stone which was now uppermost was of a different hue from the side that had weathered, and was now turned underneath, and of a different hue from the other stones about it.
Accompanied by Hickok, Buffalo Bill went on across the rocks, looking carefully ahead of him; for there was always the danger of ambush, as they were now in unknown and hostile Indian territory.
The trail of turned pebbles, with here and there an overturned stone, guided them, until they came again to a sandy depression between rocks, where once more they discovered an oblong hole suggesting the footprint of some large and unknown animal.
But at the side of this footprint was a bright, new rifle cartridge, and finger marks that were surely made by a human hand, where fingers had obviously reached down to pick up the dropped cartridge, but had failed.
Buffalo Bill looked at this intently.
“That’s plain enough,” he said; “this is the trail of a man, who passed along here in the darkness, or, perhaps, in the moonlight, for there was a bright moon along toward morning. Being in a hurry, or not able to see well, he now and then stepped into one of these sandy hollows, and here he dropped a cartridge from his belt, or out of his pocket, and tried to find it, but failed, probably because in the bad light he couldn’t see it.”