Fifteen bullets ought to be enough to kill anything—even an elephant, even a whale. The buffalo wasn’t very large. It ought to fall, and yet, perversely, it wouldn’t. It seemed to him that everything in Texas was that way. Indians popped out of bare ground, or from the sides of hills, disguised as mountain goats. Snakes crawled in people’s bedrolls, and thorns in the brush country were as poisonous as snakebites, once they got in you. It was all an aggravation, in his view. Back in Tennessee, beast and man were much better behaved.
