It seemed that in such a place the one who opened his soul to heaven must become endowed with all those singular gifts he had longed for.

He looked confidently forward to the time when they should regard him as a man who could work miracles.
At the head of Grand Island they came to vast herds of buffalo--restless brown seas of humped, shaggy backs and fiercely lowered heads.

In their first efforts to slay these they shot them full in the forehead, and were dismayed to find that their bullets rebounded harmlessly.

They solved the mystery later, discovering the hide on the skull of a dead bull to be an inch thick and covered with a mat of gnarled hair in itself almost a shield against bullets.

Joel Rae, with the divine right of youth, drew for them from this circumstance an instructive parallel.
So was the head of their own church protected against Gentile shafts by the hide of righteousness and the matted hair of faith.
The Indians killed buffalo by riding close and striking them with an arrow at the base of the spine; whereupon the beast would fall paralysed, to be hamstrung at leisure.