tail seemed little better than a piece of wire filed off to a point, and he vented his misery in piteous squeaks as the sympathetic Varley confided him tenderly to the care of his mother. How Fan managed to cure him no one can tell, but cure him she did, for in the course of a few weeks Crusoe was as well and sleek and fat as ever.
Chapter II.—A Shooting Match.
SHORTLY after the incident narrated in the last chapter the squatters of the Mustang Valley lost their leader. Major Hope suddenly announced his intention of quitting the settlement and returning to the civilized world. Private matters, he said, required his presence there—matters which he did not choose to speak of, but which would prevent his returning again to reside among them. Go he must, and, being a man of determination, go he did; but before going he distributed all his goods and chattels among the settlers. He even gave away his rifle, and Fan and Crusoe. These last, however, he resolved should go together; and as they were well worth having, he announced that he would give them to the best shot in the valley. He stipulated that the winner should escort him to the nearest settlement eastward, after which he might return with the rifle on his shoulder.
Accordingly, a long level piece of ground on the river’s bank, with a perpendicular cliff at the end of it, was selected as the shooting-ground, and, on the appointed day, the competitors began to assemble.
“Well, lad, first as usual,” exclaimed Joe Blunt, as he reached the ground and found Dick there before him.
“I’ve bin here more than an hour lookin’ for a new kind o’ flower that Jack Morgan told me he’d seen. I’ve found it too. Did you ever see one like it before?”
Blunt carefully examined the flower.
“Why, yes, I’ve seed a-many o’ them up about the Rocky Mountains, but never one here-away. It seems to have gone lost itself. The last I seed, if I remimber rightly, wos near the head-waters o’ Yellowstone River, it wos—jest where I shot a grizzly bar.”
“Was that the bar that gave you the wipe on the cheek?” asked Varley, forgetting the flower in his interest about the bear.
“It wos. I put six balls in that bar’s carcass, and
