The Texas Hawks: The Strange Decoy

“Bah! for my part, I believe it sheer nonsense—nothing but a hoax.”

“So said I until lately; but now I know there is something in it.”

The sentences just noted were spoken in very dissimilar tones: the first one careless and slightly scoffing—the second low and earnest. Both speakers were young and of prepossessing appearance.

The scene was an attractive one, though somewhat similar ones have been described time and time again. In fact it was the bivouac of a hunting party.

One glance would decide this. The soiled and blood-stained garments of the half-score figures gathered around the cheerful, crackling fire, in attitudes of careless ease, for the most part with pipe in mouth, the half-picked bones and fragments of meat scattered profusely here and there, telling of a hearty meal just passed by. The horses, rudely hoppled, grazing eagerly hard-by, their sides still wet with sweat; the plentiful supply of rudely-butchered meat that hung suspended from the trees around, mostly of buffalo and deer, all told plainly that this was the bivouac of hunters, resting after a successful day’s chase.

In conscious security they had kindled their camp-fire, and now, without a thought of danger, were enjoying that indispensable luxury of a true plainsman—pipes and tobacco.

Though our hunters had not given the matter a thought, the camp had been pitched in a truly lovely and picturesque spot. At this point two goodly-sized timber-islands extended an arm toward each other, almost meeting. In fact, though the tree-trunks were separated by several yards, their long branches fairly touched, interweaved together, forming a gayly-tinted arch, the frost-touched leaves vying in brilliancy with the colors of the rainbow.

Through and beyond this natural bower, the prairie stretched far away in gently-undulating swells, studded at irregular intervals with timber mottes, something similar to those beside which we find our friends. Close to these twin mottes was a clear stream of water, a confluent of the Trinity River.

As already incidentally mentioned, the party consisted of half a score of hunters, all young—the eldest scarcely numbering thirty years, while one or two were a third less than that. They were such men as can only be found apart from the great cities, nurtured in the broad West, their limbs and lungs fully developed by the clear, pure atmosphere of the prairies. They would have been out of place in a ladies’ drawing-room, because they were at home here. Their hair was worn long; scarcely one of their faces had ever known the touch of a razor, giving their beards a glossy silkiness seldom seen, that even the scorching sun or crinkling winds of winter could not destroy.