HEROES OF THE LONE STAR STATE.

905

In the morning he had a crick in his neck, from sleeping with a block of wood for a pillow. Next he hinted to Big Foot that he felt as if he had been bitten by insects. The man asked him where he had gotten his buckskin suit, intimating that, no doubt, it contained vermin. This made the literary stranger perfectly wretched.

The journey after the Indians was soon begun, the men dividing their time between fun with the author and a lookout for redskins. Late in the afternoon a storm came up. The stranger proudly raised his umbrella amid the jeers of the men, but the first gust of wind turned it inside out and whirled it from his hand. He slept that night in a puddle of water. Evidently his notions of the romantic side of frontier life were undergoing a change. In the morning the wrecked umbrella was found lodged in a neighboring bush. Each of the men fired at it with their big revolvers. When the firing ceased, the stranger sadly gathered the remains of the umbrella, and strapped them on his saddle.

In the afternoon an early halt was made. The stranger, hearing the men say they would look around for game, took his little bird gun and strolled away himself. In a luttle while Big Foot heard both barrels of the gun go off, and he at once seized his rifle and ran in the direction of the sound. He found the stranger. He was running round and round a tree, dodging an immense buck, which was after him. He screamed to Wallace to shoot the animal, but the Texan, almost splitting with laughter, pretended to think that the author was really chasing the buck instead of the buck chasing him, and trying to lay hold of the animal to cut his throat. The frightened man, breathless with incessant exertions to avoid the vicious lunges which the animal made with its horns, one of which carried away the tail of his buckskin shirt, screamed louder and louder, earnestly protesting that this was not the case. Big Foot seemed not to believe, said it was a joke, praised his pluck, told him he would soon tire out the buck, and finally, when the man was about