Alas for our joy of victory!  Our success was our undoing.  The very motion of my throwing up my hat, boyish as it was, gave fright to my horse, already startled by the shot.  He flung up his head high, snorted, and was off, fast as he could go.  I followed him on foot, rapidly as I could, but he would none of that, and was all for keeping away from me at a safe distance.  This the girl saw, and she rode up now, springing down and offering me her horse.

“Stay here,” I called to her as I mounted.  “I’ll be back directly”; and then with such speed as I could spur out of my new mount, I started again after the fugitive.

It was useless.  Her horse, already lame and weary, and further handicapped by my weight, could not close with the free animal, and without a rope to aid me in the capture, it would have been almost impossible to have stopped him, even had I been able to come alongside.  I headed him time and again, and turned him, but it was to no purpose.  At last I suddenly realized that I had no idea how far I had gone or in what direction.  I must now think of my companion.  Never was more welcome sight than when I saw her on a distant ridge, waving her hat.  I gave up the chase and returned to her, finding that in her fatigue she had sunk to the ground exhausted.  She herself had run far away from the spot where I had left ’her.

“I was afraid,” she panted.  “I followed.  Can’t you catch him?”

“No,” said I, “he’s gone.  He probably will go back to the trail.”

“No,” she said, “they run wild, sometimes.  But now what shall we do?”

I looked at her in anxiety.  I had read all my life of being afoot on the Plains.  Here was the reality.

“But you are hurt,” she cried.  “Look, your wound is bleeding.”

I had not known it, but my neck was wet with blood.

“Get up and ride,” she said.  “We must be going.”  But I held the stirrup for her instead, smiling.

“Mount!” I said, and so I put her up.

“Shall we go back to camp?” she asked in some perturbation, apparently forgetting that there was no camp, and that by this time the wagons would be far to the west.  For reasons of my own I thought it better to go back to the dead antelope, and so I told her.

“It is over there,” she said, pointing in the direction from which she thought she had come.  I differed with her, remembering I had ridden with the sun in my face when following it, and remembering the shape of the hilltop near by.  Finally my guess proved correct, and we found the dead animal, nearly a mile from where she had waited for me.  I hurried with the butchering, cutting the loin well forward, and rolling it all tight in the hide, bound the meat behind the saddle.

“Now, shall we go back?” she asked.  “If we rode opposite to the sun, we might strike the trail.  These hills look all alike.”

“The river runs east and west,” I said, “so we might perhaps better strike to the southward.”