Much has been said about man's part in the destruction of the buffalo; and too much could not be said against those monomaniacs of slaughter who went into the buffalo-hunt from sheer love of killing, hiring the Indians to drive a herd over an embankment or into soft snow, while the valiant hunters sat in some sheltered spot, picking off the helpless quarry. This was not hunting. It was butchery, which none but hungry savages and white barbarians practised. The plains-man--who is the true type of the buffalo-runner--entered the lists on a fair field with the odds a hundred to one against himself, and the only advantages over brute strength the dexterity of his own aim. Man was the least cruel of the buffalo's foes. Far crueler havoc was worked by the prairie fire and the fights for supremacy in the leadership of the herd and the sleuths of the trail and the wild stampedes often started by nothing more than the shadow of a cloud on the prairie. Natural history tells of nothing sadder than a buffalo herd overtaken by a prairie fire. Flee as they might, the fiery hurricane was fleeter; and when the flame swept past, the buffalo were left staggering over blackened wastes, blind from the fire, singed of fur to the raw, and mad with a thirst they were helpless to quench. In the fights for leadership of the herd old age went down before youth. Colonel Bedson's daughter has often told the writer of her sheer terror as a child when these battles took place among the buffalo. The first intimation of trouble was usually a boldness among the young fellows of maturing strength. On the rove for the first year or two of their existence these youngsters were hooked and butted back into place as a rear-guard; and woe to the fellow whose vanity tempted him within range of the leader's sharp, pruning-hook horns! Just as the wolf aimed for the throat or leg sinews of a victim, so the irate buffalo struck at the point most vulnerable to his sharp, curved horn--the soft flank where a quick rip meant torture and death.