1 40 In the United States v 



tion, and knowing that death is certain, chooses to 

 meet it his own way, and makes it as sweet as he 

 can with revenge. Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack 

 have the same feeling for Indians that the true 

 sportsman has for game, " they love them, and they 

 slay them." They admit that in many respects they 

 resemble human beings, but hold that they are 

 badly finished, their faces looking as if they had 

 been chopped out of red - wood blocks with a 

 hatchet, and say that they must never be trusted, 

 friendly or unfriendly, and that they must be shot 

 if they will steal horses. I remember once shooting 

 a swan, the leader of a party of five, two old and 

 three young ones, and sending one of the men 

 to recover it. He came back to me in quite a 

 melancholy state, and told me that the cry of its 

 mate had made him feel so sad, " the poor thing was 

 a-mourning so." Yet this good fellow would de- 

 scribe his shootings of Indians as coolly as if he 

 were describing a shot at a rabbit, and would have 

 heard the death shrieks of squaw and warrior with 

 equanimity, if not with pleasurable excitement. 



' We can see, even now, the long, low black line 

 of smoke with, here and there, a red flicker at its 

 base, which shows that the mischief is still in 

 progress. O ! the unutterable misery and dreariness 

 of a burnt prairie ; and still worse of the water- 

 courses, with the bunches of charred reeds and 

 the scorched cotton -trees — the unburnt parts of 

 their bark shining a ghastly gray against the 



