V Indian Warfare 133 



it themselves, and you, as a visitor, had better follow 

 their lead ; after all, a ten pound note more or less 

 is not worth worrying about when you're really on 

 the grand rampage. The conversation turns, of 

 course, on Indians, how they come down in the 

 spring, and lie in wait in the willow beds ready to 

 snap up any straying horse or carelessly protected 

 scalp, and then off and away with them far into the 

 desert, long before the troopers are half-way through 

 their preparations for a pursuit. These troopers — 

 most of them Germans and Irish, but with a few 

 deserters from our own army — have, indeed, no 

 earthly chance with the nimble, quick-witted Indian. 

 The only men who can cope with him are men like 

 our friends Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack, who know 

 every double and turn of his subtle, twisty and twiny 

 mind, and hunt him as a nobler species of game, in 

 whose killing there is infinite credit. By-the-bye, I 

 have not yet introduced you to these two perfect 

 specimens of the western professional hunter, a race 

 which I had been led to think of as existing only in 

 Fenimore Cooper's novels. Not that they are of 

 the leather-stocking type — if you want to meet him 

 you must go to the wooded parts of Colorado or 

 California, where you will find him, silent and ap- 

 parently slow, with his ponderous Kentucky rifle, that 

 mighty bar of iron, invariably bearing the honoured 

 name of Hawkins on its lock-plate, which no ordinary 

 mortal can " help," spending his life in that delicious, 

 observant lounging under the green -wood trees 



