He slipped the rifle over Jack's arm. "She's loaded," he said, with a grin. "Set 'er fer two hundred yards." Jack aimed long and carefully, and even as he aimed the coyote turned his broadside deliberately, as though to give him a better target. Then he fired, and a whiff of dust puffed up three hundred yards away. The coyote, however, had taken notice; perhaps the bullet didn't pass so far above him, at that. He stretched himself like a tawny ribbon and bolted with amazing speed into the wilderness. Jack sent two more wild shots into space. "Toler'ble safe," was Jake's comment as he laid the rifle away. "Toler'ble safe." Half an hour later he pulled up again. "How about you?" he said, turning to me. I could see nothing until, following the line of his arm and finger, I at length detected an object behind a little whitish willow bush, appropriately called the wolf willow. Even then I could see only a pair of sharp ears and the triangular outline of a head; there was nothing else visible. "You better take him, Jake," I said. "You're a real shot." I felt I owed him that much for that wallop with the tent peg. He was nothing loath to take up the rifle, and I began to realize how big a courtesy it was to offer us the first shot. He drew the gun to his shoulder, craned his neck down along the stock, steadied the barrel an instant, and fired. The coyote leaped in the air, fell on his back, kicking and pawing in the wolf willow. We drove over to him, but already his lips had curled back in a death-snarl from his gleaming teeth. Jake drove on in silence while we meditated upon his amazing marksmanship. Any comment on our part would have been superfluous, a fact which no doubt our driver understood. But his thought was evidently running along some course similar to ours, although skirting into wider fields. "If ever there's a big war," he remarked at length, "an' I reckon there will be some day, the chaps from these prairies will sure give 'em hell." It was a strange speech for Jake. Jake, short and fat-waisted, guiltless of coat or waist-coat, his coarse blue shirt flying open at the neck, little streams of tobacco juice meandering down his stubby chin, his slouch hat pulled low on his head and his brown, tangled hair tufted out about the ears; most of all, his pudgy feet, which would not reach the floor of the wagon box--surely here was as unmilitary looking an individual as one could picture. And yet, his amazing keenness of eyesight, his quick, accurate, uncanny marksmanship, and his calm assurance in which there was no word of boasting, but a mere statement of fact, that if ever there were a big war the boys from the prairies would "give 'em hell!" We camped that night by a stream of which Jake knew, because there was little water on the prairies, even at the first of May. Next day we drove all day, and later into the evening than usual; it was quite dark when we stopped.