ning and oiling when I get back to camp."

Having been thrown considerably off his course, Butler found some
difficulty in picking it up again, but he found it at last, then guided
by the compass made his way straight to where the antelope lay amid a
thick mass of undergrowth. He examined her and found that the bullet had
entered just behind the left shoulder.

"I couldn't have done any better than that at fifty yards," chuckled the
boy. "The next question is, how am I going to get her to camp? I reckon
I shall have to tote her."

CHAPTER XIII

A PONY RIDER BOY'S PLUCK

"White boy him make shoot," grunted Anvik.

"He has shot?" questioned Ned.

"Ugh."

"How do you know?"

"Hear um."

"You must have pretty good ears. I haven't heard anything," replied the
fat boy. "How do you know it wasn't someone else?"

"Know um gun."

"It is queer we didn't hear him," said the Professor. "Do you think he
got some game?"

The guide nodded.

"We shall see how good a fortune-teller you are, but the joke will be on
you if it should prove not to have been Butler at all."

To this the guide made no reply. In the meantime, Tad Butler was having
his troubles. The problem of how to get the antelope back to camp was
not so easily solved. But Tad thought he knew a way. First he got a
stick, which he sharpened at both ends. The stick, about six feet long,
he thrust through slits he had made in the hocks of the animal, somewhat
similar to what he would have done had he been going to string the
carcass up.

First strapping his rifle over his shoulder, the Pony Rider Boy raised
the stick to his shoulders also, and, stooping, lifted the animal. It
was a heavy burden and he staggered. The head of the antelope was
dragging on the ground, which made Butler's labor still more trying.

The lad started away, keeping close to the stream in his search of a
fording place, but he failed to find anything that looked easier than
the portage he had used before, so he finally decided to go back to
that. By the time he reached the former point he was obliged to drop his
burden and sink down on the rocks to rest.

"Whew, but it's hot. And the mosquitoes and the gnats! If it isn't one
pest in the wilds, it is sure to be another and a worse one," he
concluded somewhat illogically, measuring the width of the stream with
his eyes. "I'll try it."

The weight of his burden was a help rather than otherwise in crossing
the glacial stream,