ck Varley determined
not to wait for the return of their comrades who were in pursuit of the
other two hunters, but to go straight home, so for several days they
galloped away over the prairie. At nights, when they encamped, Crusoe
was thrown on the ground like a piece of old lumber, and left to lie
there with a mere scrap of food till morning, when he was again thrown
across the horse of his captor and carried on. When the village was
reached, he was thrown again on the ground, and would certainly have
been torn to pieces in five minutes by the Indian curs which came
howling round him, had not an old woman come to the rescue and driven
them away. With the help of her grandson--a little naked creature, just
able to walk, or rather to stagger--she dragged him to her tent, and,
undoing the line that fastened his mouth, offered him a bone.

Although lying in a position that was unfavourable for eating purposes,
Crusoe opened his jaws and took it. An awful crash was followed by two
crunches--and it was gone; and Crusoe looked up in the old squaw's face
with a look that said plainly, "Another of the same, please, and as
quick as possible." The old woman gave him another and then a lump of
meat, which latter went down with a gulp--but he coughed after it! and
it was well he didn't choke. After this the squaw left him, and Crusoe
spent the remainder of that night gnawing the cords that bound him. So
diligent was he that he was free before morning and walked deliberately
out of the tent. Then he shook himself, and with a yell that one might
have fancied was intended for defiance, he bounded joyfully away, and
was soon out of sight.

To a dog with a good appetite which had been on short allowance for
several days, the mouthful given to him by the old squaw was a mere
nothing. All that day he kept bounding over the plain from bluff to
bluff in search of something to eat, but found nothing until dusk, when
he pounced suddenly and most unexpectedly on a prairie-hen fast asleep.
In one moment its life was gone. In less than a minute its body was
gone too--feathers and bones and all--down Crusoe's ravenous throat.

On the identical spot Crusoe lay down and slept like a top for four
hours. At the end of that time he jumped up, bolted a scrap of skin
that somehow had been overlooked at supper, and flew straight over the
prairie to the spot where he had had the scuffle with the Indian. He
came to the edge of the river, too