And yet there were a good many things in it to remind one of the plains. There was no carpet on the floor, but there were rugs in abundance, although they were not such rugs as we have in our houses. They were made of the skins of the wild animals that had fallen to the colonel’s breech loader. The commandant was not only a brave soldier, a successful Indian fighter, and a daring horseman, but he was also an enthusiastic sportsman and a crack shot with the rifle. The walls of his room were adorned with numerous trophies of his skill as a hunter and marksman in the shape of antlers, skins, and deer heads (the latter not quite so well mounted as they ought to be, Oscar thought); and the brace of magnificent Scotch greyhounds, which were lying at their ease on an elk skin in front of the blazing logs that were piled in the huge, old-fashioned fireplace, were fair specimens of the pack the colonel had imported for the purpose of coursing the antelope that were so abundant on the prairie. The weapons the colonel used in war and in the chase were conspicuously displayed, and beside them hung Indian relics of all descriptions. There was the shield that had once belonged to the hostile chief Yellow Bear, who had given the soldiers and settlers a world of trouble, and who was almost as celebrated in his day as Sitting Bull was a few years ago. It was ornamented with the scalps the chief had taken during his numerous raids, and exactly in the centre of it was the hole made by a bullet from the colonel’s rifle, which had put an end to one raid and terminated the career of Yellow Bear at the same time. Hanging on one side the portrait of a distinguished army officer was the strong bow, made of elk horn, and braced with deer sinews, which the colonel used when he went out to hunt coyotes; and on the other was the tomahawk he had wrested from the hands of the warrior who had rushed up to secure his scalp when his (the colonel’s) horse was shot under him. It was by no means the terrible-looking weapon that Oscar had supposed an Indian tomahawk to be. It was simply a plasterer’s hatchet, which the former owner had purchased of a trader. The colonel, who was sitting in an easy-chair, reading one of the papers which Oscar had laid on his table the day before, looked up as the boy entered and pointed to a seat on the opposite side of the fireplace.