"Another year or so," he said, "and you will never see on this patch of land such melons as these. They will never do so well again on this soil as this year. I never saw such big melons as these, and if we had planted them a little nearer together, I don't in the least doubt that any smart boy, like Sandy here, could walk all over the field stepping from one melon to another, if he only had a pole to balance himself with as he walked. There would be nothing very 'wonderful-like' about that. It's a pity that we have no use for these, there are so many of them and they are so good. Pity some of the folks at home haven't a few of them--a hundred or two, for instance." It did seem a great waste of good things that these hundreds and hundreds of great watermelons should decay on the ground for lack of somebody to eat them. In the very wantonness of their plenty the settlers had been accustomed to break open two or three of the finest of the fruit before they could satisfy themselves that they had got one of the best. Even then they only took the choicest parts, leaving the rest to the birds. By night, too, the coyotes, or prairie-wolves, mean and sneaking things that they were, would steal down into the melon-patch, and, in the desperation of their hunger, nose into the broken melons left by the settlers, and attempt to drag away some of the fragments, all the time uttering their fiendish yelps and howls. Somebody had told the boys that the juice of watermelons boiled to a thick syrup was a very good substitute for molasses. Younkins told them that, back in old Missouri, "many families never had any other kind of sweetenin' in the house than watermelon molasses." So Charlie made an experiment with the juice boiled until it was pretty thick. All hands tasted it, and all hands voted that it was very poor stuff. They decided that they could not make their superabundance of watermelons useful except as an occasional refreshment. CHAPTER XV. PLAY COMES AFTER WORK. The two cabins built, wood for the winter cut and hauled, and the planting all done, there was now nothing left to do but to wait and see the crop ripen. Their good friend Younkins was in the same fortunate condition, and he was ready to suggest, to the intense delight of the boys, that they might be able to run into a herd of buffalo, if they should take a notion to follow the old Indian trail out to the feeding-grounds. In those days there was no hunting west of the new settlement, except that by the Indians. In that vague and mysterious way by which reports travel--in the air, as it were--among all frontier settlements, they had heard that buffalo were plenty in the vast ranges to the westward, the herds moving slowly northward, grazing as they went. It was now the season of wild game, and so the boys were sent across to Younkins's to ask him what he thought of a buffalo-hunting trip.