At this Delorier’s placid face flew instantly into a paroxysm of contortions.  He grinned with wrath, chattered, gesticulated, and hurled forth a volley of incoherent words in broken English at the astonished Tete Rouge.  It was just possible to make out that he was accusing him of having stolen and eaten four large cakes which had been laid by for dinner.  Tete Rouge, utterly confounded at this sudden attack, stared at Delorier for a moment in dumb amazement, with mouth and eyes wide open.  At last he found speech, and protested that the accusation was false; and that he could not conceive how he had offended Mr. Delorier, or provoked him to use such ungentlemanly expressions.  The tempest of words raged with such fury that nothing else could be heard.  But Tete Rouge, from his greater command of English, had a manifest advantage over Delorier, who after sputtering and grimacing for a while, found his words quite inadequate to the expression of his wrath.  He jumped up and vanished, jerking out between his teeth one furious sacre enfant de grace, a Canadian title of honor, made doubly emphatic by being usually applied together with a cut of the whip to refractory mules and horses.

The next morning we saw an old buffalo escorting his cow with two small calves over the prairie.  Close behind came four or five large white wolves, sneaking stealthily through the long meadow-grass, and watching for the moment when one of the children should chance to lag behind his parents.  The old bull kept well on his guard, and faced about now and then to keep the prowling ruffians at a distance.

As we approached our nooning place, we saw five or six buffalo standing at the very summit of a tall bluff.  Trotting forward to the spot where we meant to stop, I flung off my saddle and turned my horse loose.  By making a circuit under cover of some rising ground, I reached the foot of the bluff unnoticed, and climbed up its steep side.  Lying under the brow of the declivity, I prepared to fire at the buffalo, who stood on the flat surface about not five yards distant.  Perhaps I was too hasty, for the gleaming rifle-barrel leveled over the edge caught their notice; they turned and ran.  Close as they were, it was impossible to kill them when in that position, and stepping upon the summit I pursued them over the high arid tableland.  It was extremely rugged and broken; a great sandy ravine was channeled through it, with smaller ravines entering on each side like tributary streams.  The buffalo scattered, and I soon lost sight of most of them as they scuttled away through the sandy chasms; a bull and a cow alone kept in view.  For a while they ran along the edge of the great ravine, appearing and disappearing as they dived into some chasm and again emerged from it.  At last they stretched out upon the broad prairie, a plain nearly flat and almost devoid of verdure, for every short grass-blade was dried and shriveled by the glaring sun.  Now and then the old bull