Steve looked down at the nearest pile of ruined masonry with a saddening face.
"You have no horse, no blanket, no provisions, no supply of ammunition except what you brought along for to-day's hunt. Why, Steve, I'm ashamed of you. There isn't a young Lipan brave in the whole band that would set off in such a fashion as that—sure to make a failure. You ought to have learned something from the Indians, it seems to me."
Steve blushed scarlet as he listened, for he had been ready the moment before to have shouldered his rifle and set off at once toward that vague and unknown western "gap." It must be that the glimpse he had taken of that golden ledge had stirred up all the "boy" in him.
"I guess I wouldn't have gone far," he said, "before I'd have run clean out of cartridges. I've less than two dozen with me."
"When you do start, my boy, I'll see to it that you get a good outfit. Now let's try for one of those deer. It's a long shot. See if you can make it."
A fine buck with branching antlers, followed by two does, had been feeding in the open space beyond the ruins. The wind was brisk just then from that direction, and they had not scented the two hunters. They had slowly drawn nearer and nearer, until they were now about three hundred yards away. That is a greater distance than is at all safe shooting for any but the best marksmen, and sometimes even they will lose their game at it.
The stories so often told of "long shots" at deer and tigers and geese and other terrible wild beasts are for the greater part of the kind that are known as "fish stories," and Steve would have been glad if that buck had been a few rods nearer. He knew his rifle was a good one, however, for it was a seven-shooting repeater of the latest and best pattern, and had been selected for him by Murray himself out of a lot the Lipans had brought in, nobody knew from where.
"Steady, Steve. Think of the deer, not of the gold mine."
"I'll aim at him as if he were a gold mine," replied Steve, as he raised his rifle.
"I'll try for one of the does at the same time," said Murray.