Mr. Masterson slipped another cartridge into the buffalo gun. Then he warily approached the Tomcat, muzzle to the fore, finger on the trigger. A dying man will sometimes pull a six-shooter with the last flicker of his failing strength, and snatch a vengeance as he quits the earth. Mr. Masterson seized the Tomcat by the shoulders and dragged him from under Shylock—still heaving and plunging to regain his feet. There was no call for a second look; the experienced Mr. Masterson could tell by the ash-colour struggling through the brown that the death-draw was on the Tomcat at the very moment. The Tomcat, hiccoughing and bleeding, lay on the short stiff grass and rolled a hateful eye on his executioner. Mr. Masterson, thinking on the girl who died in Dodge, gave back a look as hateful. And this, in the midst of the lonesome plains, is what these two spoke to one another—these, the slayer and the slain, to show how bald is truth! “You blank-blanked-blankety-blank! you ought to have made a better shot than that!” said the Tomcat. “Well, you blank-blanked murderer, I did the best I could,” said Mr. Masterson. Mr. Masterson, as he walked his horse over the hill upon which he had first beheld the coming of the Tomcat, halted and looked back. Shylock of the empty saddle nosed up to Mr. Masterson’s horse in a friendly way. Five miles to the south, on the banks of the Medicine Lodge, a raven wheeled and stooped. Away to the west a coyote yelped; another yelped an answer, and then another. Mr. Masterson shrugged his wide shoulders. The coyote by daylight makes gruesome melody. “The ground was too hard to dig a grave,” said Mr. Masterson, as he turned his horse’s head again towards Dodge, “even if I’d had the tools. Besides, I wasn’t elected undertaker, but sheriff.” CHAPTER IX THE MEDICINE OF LONE WOLF The Lone Wolf had lost his “medicine,” and that was a most serious disaster. To lose one’s “medicine” among the Indians is equivalent to losing one’s money among the Whites, and means just as bad a mess in one’s social and business affairs. One’s smell-feast friends of the day before go by one with averted or unseeing eye, while everything and everybody give evidence that one is beneath the notice of a self-respecting world. Thus it was with the Lone Wolf when now his “medicine” had left him. Bear Shield, his chief, looked over him or through him without sign or word that might be construed into an admission of his existence. Fellow Cheyennes who had sat with him in the council or rode knee to knee with him in the charge no longer knew him by mark of face or sound of name. His squaws moped over the camp-fire with bowed heads; his pappooses whimpered with the shame of what they felt but did not understand; his dogs, cowed and dispirited, crept about with craven tails clewed close between their legs; even his ponies made a disgraced band by themselves, cropping dejected grass apart, as though unfit to mingle with the reputable mustangs of mankind.