202 
PRONG-HORNED ANTELOPE. 
after our long watcliings against Camanche, Apatclie,Wako and Paramanii, 
who among us, as we knew' how Indians sometimes personate the animals 
of the section they live in, but listened with intense interest to the slightest 
noise foreign to our previous knowledge. The short quick stampings of im- 
patience or nervousness, continually repeated hy the animals, were, how- 
ever, soon distinguished in the stillness of our prairie camp at night, and 
feeling thus assured that only one of the deer tribe was the cause of 
our anxiety, blankets and tent soon covered us, and we left the beautiful 
and innocent creatures, now that we knew them, to their own reflections, 
if any they made, as to who and what we were, until morning. 
At day light, Rhoades and Van Horn, two hunters good as ever ac- 
companied a train across the broad prairies ranged over by Buffalo, 
Elk. or Deer, looked out the trails, and reported Antelopes ; but brought 
none to camp ; not expecting to see any more of this herd, we started on 
our tramp towards the great Sonora Desert. 
Stevenson had a new horse, and as he had never been mounted with- 
out blindfolding him, after the Mexican fashion with young horses, being 
wild, his owner, by way of making him ?not'e gentle, commenced beat- 
ing him with a stick that might have been selected to kill him ; before 
I had time to know w'hat was going on and interfere for the poor 
horse, he had looked to his own interests, pulled away, and with a 
bounding gallop went off, like an escaped prisoner, leading four of our 
best men and horses some ten miles ahead of the train, and when the 
runaway was at length overtaken. Van Horn, Pennypacker, Me. Ousker, 
and myself were greatly in advance ; the curve we had made from the 
road was slight, and on reaching it again, no trail told that the company 
had passed, so we had time to look about us, and loitered to rest our tired 
horses, when simultaneously we saw the back of a deer or Antelope ; its 
head was hidden by the tall grass in which it was grazing on the soft juicy 
young shoots at the roots of the old tussocks: Van Horn, with his unerring 
aim and Mississippi rifle, the eccentric twist of which, no doubt taken from 
Wesson’s patent, renders these guns superior to all we have tried, was told 
to kill it. For a few seconds he was lost to our sight, though only a 
hundred yards from us, so low did he squat in the sparse tufts of dead 
grass and stinking wormwood. How curious it is to stand waiting the 
result of the skill and caution of the well tried hunter, at such a time ; 
again and again we saw the back of the Antelope, as he passed one bunch 
of shrubbery after another, but never saw our hunter ; at every moment 
we expected to see the wary animal with sense of smell so keen as nine 
times out often to save him from his enemies, hound away ; but how diffe- 
rent was his bound when he did leap, not forward, but straight upward. 
