“A prize, to which we are justly entitled!” exclaimed Glenn, riding forward, on discovering it to be the buffalo (now dead) that they had fired upon early in the evening, and which circumstance he was relating to Boone at the moment of the discovery by Joe.

“You have not only been lucky as hunters,” said Boone, as they dismounted to inspect the animal, (which was an enormous bull,) “but, what is extraordinary indeed, when you find your fallen game, it is already cooked!”

“Huzza for us!” cried Joe, momentarily forgetting the Indians, in his extravagant joy of having aided in killing the animal, and at the same time leaping astride of it.

“The wolves have been here before us,” observed Boone, seeing a large quantity of the buffalo’s viscera on the ground, which he supposed had been torn out by those ravenous animals.

“Oh! oh! oh! oh!” exclaimed Joe, leaping up, and running a few steps, and then tumbling down and continuing his cries.

“What has hurt the fellow so badly?” inquired Glenn, walking round from the back of the animal to the front.  The words were scarcely uttered before he likewise sprang away, hastily, as he beheld a pronged instrument thrust from the orifice in the body whence the bowels had been extracted!

“Dod!  I wonder if it’s wolves or Injins!” exclaimed a voice within the cavity of the huge body.

“I’ve heard that voice before—­it must be Sneak’s,” said Boone, laughing heartily.

Now the buffalo was observed to quiver slightly, and after some exertion to extricate himself, the long snake-like form of the redoubtable “Hatchet-face” came forth and stood erect before the gaping mouth and staring eyes of Joe.

“If I didn’t hear a white man speak, I wish I may be singed!” exclaimed Sneak, wiping the moisture from his face, and rolling his eyes round.

“What did you stick that sharp thing in the calf of my leg for?” demanded Joe, shaking his head threateningly and coming forward.

“He! he! he!  That’s revenge for shooting my pups,” replied Sneak.

“But how came you here?” inquired Boone.

“I was taking a hunt”—­here Boone interrupted him by asking where his gun was.  “I had no gun,” said Sneak; and then stooping down and running his arm into the body of the buffalo, he produced a pronged spear, about four feet in length; “this,” he continued, “is what I hunted with, and I was hunting after muskrats in the ponds out here, when the fire came like blazes, and like to ’ave ketched me!  I dropped all the muskrats I had stuck, and streaked it for about an hour towards the river.  But it gained on me like lightning, and I’d ’ave been in a purty fix if I hadn’t come across this dead bull.  I out with my knife and was into him in less than no time—­but split me, if I didn’t feel the heat of the fire as I pulled in my feet!  I knew the Injins was about, by the buffalo; and the tarnation wolves, too, are always everywhere, and that accounts for my jobbing that feller’s leg when he sot down on top of me.”