Scarcely had his plane come to rest than fresh perils threatened. There came a strange sound from the bank of the lake.
“What can it be?” His heart skipped a beat. Instinctively he put out a hand for a stout yew bow and a quiver of arrows that always hung beside his cabin door, for like his friend Johnny, Curlie, as you will recall, was an expert bowman.
In ever increasing volume there came to his ears the sound of cracking and crashing.
“Sounds like a forest fire,” he told himself. “But there is no fire. Like a thousand range cattle. But there are no cattle. What can it be?”
Soon enough he was to know. From the brush that grew by the shore bounded a brown mass with four short legs and a tossing head.
“Buffaloes!” He was amazed. His amazement grew. Three, six, nine, twenty, fifty, a hundred of these ponderous creatures landed upon the ice, then came plunging toward him. In a space of seconds, hundreds more joined them in wild stampede.
“They are mad with fear!” He was all but in a panic himself. “What am I to do? The plane will be wrecked. It will be laid up for weeks; the contest lost, everything lost!”
He broke off short. The thread of an old prairie-buffalo story had entered his mind.
“These are woods-buffaloes,” he told himself. “But buffaloes must be the same everywhere. I can but try.”
Gripping his bow, he stepped boldly out from his plane and walked like some young David to meet the onrushing throng. He was a full thirty yards from his plane, the foremost buffalo scarcely more than that from him, when with heart pounding painfully against his ribs, but with fingers that perfectly obeyed his will, he paused to set a steel pointed arrow against his bowstring. Then he took one long breath before the test which must mean victory or defeat.