THE TEXAN HUNTRESS. 283 



plain with its flower eyes, the benignant sun, the wide air 

 itself, all seem for one instant to have stood still to gaze upon 

 the unholy deed. There lies the quiet victim ! He feels 

 their reproach as he looks upon its fixed, but undimmed eyes. 



He cannot stand all this. I said it was but for one instant, 

 and then his habitual hardness returns ; the awe he throws off 

 with a sneer ; the carcass is slung upon his horse, and he turns 

 its head towards the nearest high land to look how the 

 country lies. If he recognizes no familiar land-marks, and 

 he sees that he is out of his range, he then takes his course 

 by the direction of the prevailing winds, the moss upon the 

 trees, the position of the sun, the course of the streams or of the 

 buffalo trails, b'y the flight of birds, or thousand other tele- 

 graphic characters which he has learned to read. 



But then he has nevertheless experienced, however briefly, 

 this vague feeling of terror and dread, to which we have al- 

 luded, and no one but an old skinny Trapper, whose whole 

 life has been spent among the mountains, ever entirely loses 

 this sensation on realizing that he is lost in these mighty 

 solitudes ; because, in the first place, he is never lost, and in 

 the next, if he were, it would be all the same to him. He 

 can live wherever a snail, a lizzard, or a raven can live, 

 and he cares little if he never sees the face of man for a year 

 or two ; in that time he is sure to come out somewhere, even 

 if it be on the Pacific coast ! The deep gorges of the moun- 

 tains afford him shelter and repose in winter ; the open plain 

 or forest glades a couch in summer ; a rock is pillow soft 

 enough for him, and piping winds do well for lullabies, though 

 they do bring the thunder for their bass ! 



He starves until ravin makes him wild, and then his rifle 

 is more inexorable than the bolts of death. The famishing 

 wolf is merciful to him. Earth and her creatures are nothing, 

 now, but fuel and food to glut his shriveled maw. Blood ! 

 blood ! Blood is to him Ambrosia. The Nectar of the gods 

 would not tempt him from the greasy esculence of " beaver 



