I had broken his neck. He had cost us a good many cartridges, and, though my last shot was well aimed, there was doubtless considerable chance in my hitting him, while there was no excuse at all for at least one of my previous misses. Nevertheless, all old hunters know that there is no other kind of shooting in which so many cartridges are expended for every head of game bagged. As we knelt down to butcher the antelope, the clouds broke and the rain fell. Hastily we took off the saddle and hams, and, packing them behind us on our horses, loped to the wagon in the teeth of the cold storm. When we overtook it, after some sharp riding, we threw in the meat, and not very much later, when the day was growing dusky, caught sight of the group of low ranch buildings toward which we had been headed. We were received with warm hospitality, as one always is in a ranch country. We dried our streaming clothes inside the warm ranch-house and had a good supper, and that night we rolled up in our blankets and tarpaulins, and slept soundly in the lee of a big haystack. The ranch-house stood in the winding bottom of a creek; the flanking hills were covered with stunted cedar, while dwarf cottonwood and box-elder grew by the pools in the half-dried creek bed. Next morning we had risen by dawn. The storm was over, and it was clear and cold. Before sunrise we had started. We were only some thirty miles away from my ranch, and I directed the Sheriff how to go there, by striking east until he came to the main divide, and then following that down till he got past a certain big plateau, when a turn to the right down any of the coulees would bring him into the river bottom near the ranch-house. We wished ourselves to ride off to one side and try to pick up another antelope. However, the Sheriff took the wrong turn after getting to the divide, and struck the river bottom some fifteen miles out of his way, so that we reached the ranch a good many hours before he did. When we left the wagon we galloped straight across country, looking out from the divide across the great rolling landscape, every feature standing clear through the frosty air. Hour after hour we paced and loped on and on over the grassy seas in the glorious morning. Once we stopped, and I held the horses while Lambert stalked and shot a fine prongbuck; then we tied his head and hams to our saddles and again pressed forward along the divide. We had hoped to get lunch at a spring that I knew of some twelve miles from my ranch, but when we reached it we found it dry and went on without halting. Early in the afternoon we came out on the broad, tree-clad bottom on which the ranch-house stands, and, threading our way along the cattle trails soon drew up in front of the gray empty buildings.