In 1873 times were not so good for the hunters as they had been. A year ago a bull’s skin was worth three dollars and a cow’s two; now prices had gone down. A bull’s skin only fetched two dollars and a cow’s one. He calculated his expenses at a dollar and a half a day, and he and his partner, Prairie Bill, could each reckon on six dollars a day profit. He would soon have made his little pile, for he banked all his money instead of gambling. Were his parents alive? Had he any friends left? He did not know; it was long years since he had had a letter. He could give no address; here to-day and there to-morrow, a wanderer on the face of the earth. Last year he fell in with a man from his old neighbourhood, but the man was too drunk to understand or to tell him anything, and the next morning he had gone away nobody knew whither, vanished into space. With such talk we went our way into the prairie to play at being buffaloes. We had not gone very far when we spied a large herd in the distance; they were moving towards us, evidently having been disturbed, for every now and then they would turn to look behind them. It is the unwritten law of the prairie that no man shall interfere with a herd that is being followed by another hunter, so we stood still and watched. In a few minutes we saw Oliver and Prairie Bill come over the horizon and on to the same divide with the buffaloes; then there was a general stampede and Oliver, leaping on to his horse, gave chase. Captain Vogel was much excited and annoyed, for in his judgment his partner had bungled the hunt badly. All of a sudden the hindmost beasts of the flying herd stopped, and Oliver, jumping off as quick as thought, dropped a cow just as she was galloping off again. It was a pretty sight, made all the more so by the mirage which threw a mist over the distance. It was like a vision seen in a dream; a ghostly hunter pursuing phantom buffaloes over a desert shrouded in the dim mystery of an opalescent haze.