They entered the sierra a little before nightfall, and were soon involved in a difficult and tortuous way amidst pine-crowned crags and precipices. Sometimes their horses' feet clattered upon shady slopes of débris; at times they trod softly upon a padded carpet of fir-needles. They were traversing a little cañon just after sunset, when, nearly two hundred yards away on the opposite side, the forms of a herd of deer were silhouetted against the fading sky.
Instinctively Stephens threw up his rifle to his shoulder; he got a bead as well as he could, though it was too dark to pick the exact spot on the animal's side as he pressed the trigger, and at the sharp report the band of dark forms disappeared as if by magic, but the loud "thud" of the bullet proclaimed that one of them had been struck. Instantly he and three of the Navajo young men dashed on foot across the little gorge and scaled the opposite steep, Faro leading the way. The bulldog nosed around for a moment where the deer had been, and as the climbers emerged on top they heard him give one joyful yelp as he darted forward on the scent; two minutes later they heard his triumphant bark, and when they got up to the spot they found him over the dead carcass of a yearling buck, shot through the lungs. It had run some five hundred yards before it dropped, and the bulldog coming up had seized it by the throat and finished the business.
The Indians were loud in praise of the dog, as their knives rapidly and skilfully dressed and cut up the game, while Stephens looked on and rewarded his pet with the tit-bits. All three of the Navajos spoke Spanish well enough for him to understand them as they praised the dog, but when they turned over the deer, and found the place where the conical bullet had come out on the other side, they changed from Spanish into Navajo, and significant laughter followed as they pointed out to one another the two holes, and then pointed to Stephens's rifle. Suddenly it flashed across him that they had got a joke on about something, and that it was not a thing new to him. Their manner made him think instantly of the day when he drove the nail, and Mahletonkwa pointed to his Winchester and told the funny story--funny, that is to say, for the Navajos--about the murder of the prospector. Though he understood no word of what they said, their gestures were too full of meaning for him to mistake them.