As for the "chasse" itself, it was glorious sport,--glorious in the unbounded freedom to wander whither one listed; glorious in the sense of mastery we felt that we alone of all the millions of mankind had reached this far-away, unvisited tract; glorious in its successes, its dangers, and its toils! There was, besides, that endless variety of adventure prairie-hunting affords. Now, it was the heavy buffalo, lumbering lazily along, and tossing his huge head in anger as the rifle-ball pierced his dense hide. Now, it was the proudly antlered stag, careering free over miles and miles of waste. At another time the grizzly bear was our prey, and our sport lay in the dense jungle or among the dwarf scrub, through which the hissing rattlesnake was darting, affrighted at the noise. In more peaceful mood, the antelope would be the victim; while the wild turkey or the great cock of the wood would grace with his bright wavy feathers the cap of him whose aim was true at longest rifle range. And these were happy days,--the very happiest of my whole life; for if sometimes regrets would arise about that road of ambition from which I had turned off, to wander in the path of mere pleasure, I bethought me that no career the luckiest fortune could have opened to me would have developed the same manly powers of endurance of heat and cold and of peril in a hundred shapes. In no other pursuit could I have educated myself to the like life of toils and dangers, bringing me daily, as it were, face to face with Death, till I could look on him without a shudder or a fear. I will not say that Donna Maria may not have passed across the picture of my mind-drawn regrets; but if her form did indeed flit past, it was to breathe a hope of some future meeting, some bright time to come, the recompense of all our separation. And I thought with pride how much more worthy of her would I be as the prairie-hunter,--the fearless follower of the bear and buffalo, accustomed to the life of the wild woods,--than as the mere adventurer, whose sole stock in trade was the subterfuge and deceit he could practise on the unwary. It was strange enough all this while that I seemed to have lost sight of my old guide-star,--the great passion of my earlier years, the desire to be a "gentleman." It was stranger still, but after-reflection has shown me that it was true, I made far greater progress toward that wished-for goal when I ceased to make it the object of my ambition. CHAPTER XXIV. THE FATE OF A GAMBUSINO