My second campaign under Captain Vogel was very different from the first. We had to face our quarry on the open prairie, stalking was out of the question, trickery and deceit the only means of getting near the poor, stupid brutes. We had to play at being buffaloes. It was not a difficult game. The two men sticking so close together as to show no daylight between them, and hunching their backs, had to lead a horse equally close behind them. The innocent simplicity of the bison was quite taken in by the stratagem, and even in the springtime, when the beasts were the most suspicious, the hunter had no difficulty in getting to within two hundred yards of his prey, provided the wind were right. Should the herd be puzzled, they would not move off except for a little way—slowly and stopping from time to time. When they stopped the men must stop too. By degrees the beasts would become more familiar, and so it was generally easy to get a shot at from one hundred to one hundred and fifty yards. In the late summer and autumn they would allow themselves to be approached quite near, so that the hunters could shoot them as easily as cows in a byre. Captain Vogel was a small, lean man, not strongly built but toughened by hard work and a strenuous life. Long elf-locks of fair, sun-bleached hair fell over his shoulders; his beard was thick and tangled. He had bright blue eyes which always seemed to be looking into the distance—a hunter’s eyes. His features were regular and showed breeding. He was clad in a nondescript suit of grey rags and a battered old wideawake; his arms were a heavy three-barrelled rifle, the only one of its kind that I ever saw—and a hunting-knife. A strange man, as gentle as a woman, a paragon alone among the hunters of the West, for he neither swore, nor smoked, nor chewed, nor drank spirits, nor gambled; not even when resting during a holiday in some town. As his name implied, he was of German origin, but he had no knowledge of his birth tongue, though he remembered hearing his father and mother speak it when he was a child. Born in the Eastern States he came West many years ago, a sickly youth, condemned by the doctors, and took to hunting in search of health. He found it in the keen air of the prairie. Now sickness and pain were strangers to him, and fatigue had lost its power over him. His little three-year-old mare, his solitary pet, followed him about like a dog. His one ambition was to set up as a farmer somewhere in the Wild Country when he should have saved money enough.