“And that’s where you’ll be wise. Especially if you want to shoot one,” Chet observed. “You might pump every ball in your rifle at the front of an old bull, and he’d only shake his head and whisk his tail like a horse bit by a fly. A bullet won’t bring down a bull, unless you are too close for comfort. Behind the foreleg is the place to aim at.”
“Very well, Davy Crockett,” returned Dig. “I have taken your advice to heart.”
Nevertheless, Digby admired his chum greatly because of Chet’s wider reading and better memory for practical things. Of course, Chet had been reading up on buffaloes ever since Rafe Peters and Tony Traddles reported seeing the stray herd near the Grub Stake trail.
“Though I never expected that we’d sight them,” admitted Dig. “Whew! Suppose we do bag one of them, old man?”
“That’s what we’re out here for,” his chum said. “Wait now till I spy out the land again.”
He stood up in his stirrups and looked through the field-glasses. The focus of the instrument brought the group of feeding buffaloes very near. Chet counted them twice to make sure.
“Sixteen, Dig!” he said, under his breath. “My goodness, boy! Wait till we get up to them.”
“Do you see the big fellow? Or was that a yarn of Tony’s? I wouldn’t believe that fellow on a stack of Bibles as high as the moon.”
“Rafe saw the big bull, too. Goodness! there he is!”
“Where?” asked Dig, looking around, startled, as though expecting to see the buffalo right at hand.