VIII: ON THE ANTELOPE FLATS
The next morning the condition of the tempers of the crew of the Rattletrap was reversed. Jack was feeling better and was quite amiable, and inclined to regret his bloodthirsty language of the night before. But Ollie and I, on our diet of gooseberries, had not prospered, and woke up as cross as Old Blacky. The first thing I did was to seize the empty gooseberry can and hit the side of the wagon a half-dozen resounding blows.
"Get up there," I cried, "and 'tend to breakfast! No pretending you're sick this morning."
"All right!" came Jack's voice, cheerfully. "Certainly. No need of your getting excited, though. You see, I really wasn't hungry last night, or I'd have got supper."
"But we were hungry!" answered Ollie. "I don't think I was ever much hungrier in my life; and then to get nothing but a pint of gooseberries! I could eat my hat this morning!"
"I'm sorry," said Jack, coming out; "but I can't cook unless I'm hungry myself. The hunger of others does not inspire me. I gave you all there was. Your hunger ought to have inspired you to do something with those gooseberries."
"I'd like to know what sort of a meal you'd have got up with a can of gooseberries?"
"Why, my dear young nephew," exclaimed Jack, "if I'd been awakened to action I'd have fricasseed those gooseberries, built them up into a gastronomical poem; and made a meal of them fit for a king. A great cook like I am is an artist as much as a great poet. He--"
"Oh, bother!" I interrupted; "the gooseberries are gone. There's the grouse Ollie shot yesterday. Do something with that for breakfast."
Jack disappeared in the wagon, and began to throw grouse feathers out the front end with a great flourish. The poor horses were much dejected, and stood with their heads down. They had eaten but little of the hay. Water was what they wanted.
"We must hitch up and go on without waiting for breakfast," I said to Ollie. "It can't be far to water now, and they must have some. Jack can be cooking the grouse in the wagon."
So we were soon under way, keeping a sharp lookout, for any signs of a house or stream of water. We had gone five or six miles, and were descending into a little valley, when there came a loud whinny from Old Blacky. Sure enough, at the foot of the hill was a stream of water. The pony ran toward it on a gallop, and as soon as we could unhitch the others they joined her. They all waded in, and drank till we feared they would never be able to wade out again. Then they stood taking little sips, and letting their lips rest just on the surface and blinking dreamily. We knew that they stood almost as much in need of food as of water, as they had had nothing but the hay since the noon before. There was a field of corn half a mile away, on a side-hill, but no house in sight.
"I'm going after some of that corn," I said to the others. "If I can't find the owner to buy it, then I'll help myself."
I mounted the pony and rode away. There was still no house in sight at the field, and I filled a sack and returned. The horses went at their breakfast eagerly. But twice during the meal they stopped and plunged in the brook and took other long drinks; and at the end Old Blacky lay down in a shallow place and rolled, and came out looking like a drowned rat.
In the meantime Jack had got the grouse ready, and we ate it about as ravenously as the horses did their corn. We had just finished, and were talking about going, when a tall man on a small horse almost covered with saddle rode up, and began to talk cheerfully on various topics. After a while he said:
"Well, boys, was that good corn?"
We all suspected the truth instantly.
"He did it!" exclaimed Jack, pointing at me. "He did it all alone. We're going to give him up to the authorities at the next town."
The man laughed, and said: "Don't do it. He may reform."
There seemed to be but one thing to do, so I said: "It was your corn, I suppose. Our only excuse is that we were out of corn. Tell us how much it is, and we'll pay you for it."
"Not a cent," answered the man, firmly. "It's all right. I've travelled through them Sand Hills myself, and I know how it is. You're welcome to all you took, and you can have another sackful if you want to go after it."
I thanked him, but told him that we expected to get some feed at Gordon, the next town. After wishing us good-luck, he rode away.
We started on, and made but a short stop for noon, near Gordon. We found ourselves in a fairly well-settled country, though the oldest settlers had been there but two or three years. The region was called the Antelope Flats, and was quite level, with occasional ravines. The trail usually ran near the railroad, and that night we camped within three or four rods of it. Long trains loaded with cattle thundered by all night. We were somewhat nervous lest Old Blacky should put his shoulder against the wagon while we slept, and push it on the track in revenge for the poor treatment we gave him in the Sand Hills, but the plan didn't happen to occur to him. It was at this camp that we encountered a remarkable echoing well. It was an ordinary open well, forty or fifty feet deep, near a neighboring house, but a word spoken above it came back repeated a score of times. We failed to account for it.
The next forenoon we jogged along much the same as usual and stopped for noon at Rushville. This was not far from the Pine Ridge Indian Agency and the place called Wounded Knee, where the battle with the Sioux was fought three or four years later. We saw a number of Indians here, and though they came up to Ollie's idea of what an Indian should be a little better than the one that rode with us, they still did not seem to be just the thing.
"I don't think," he said, "that they ought to smoke cigarettes."
"It does look like rather small business for an Indian, doesn't it?" answered Jack. "But then smoking cigarettes is small business for anybody. What's your idea of what an Indian ought to smoke?"
"Well, I'm not sure he ought to smoke anything, except of coarse the peace-pipe occasionally. And he oughtn't to smoke that very much, because an Indian shouldn't make peace very often."
"Right on the war-path all the time, flourishing a scalping-knife above his head, and whooping his teeth loose--that's your notion of an Indian."
"Well, I don't know as that is exactly it," returned Ollie, doubtfully. "But it seems to me these are hardly right. Their clothes seem to be just like white people's."
"I don't know about that," said Jack. "I saw one when I went around to the post-office wearing bright Indian moccasins, a pair of soldier's trousers, a fashionable black coat, and a cowboy hat. I never saw a white man dressed just like that."
"Well, I think they ought to wear some feathers, anyhow," insisted Ollie. "An Indian without feathers is just like a--a turkey without 'em."
The Indians were idling all over town, big, lazy, villanous-looking fellows, and very frequently they were smoking cigarettes, and often they were dressed much as Jack had described, though their clothes varied a good deal. There were two points which they all had in common, however--they were all dirty, and all carried bright, clean repeating-rifles, We wondered why they needed the rifles, since there was no game in the neighborhood.
The chief business of Rushville seemed to be shipping bones. We went over to the railroad to watch the process. There were great piles of them about the station, and men were loading them into freight-cars.
"What's done with them?" we asked of a man.
"Shipped East, and ground up for fertilizer," he answered.
"Where do they all come from?"
"Picked up about the country everywhere. Men make a business of gathering them and bringing them in at so much a load. Supply won't last many months longer, but it's good business now."
They were chiefly buffalo bones, though there were also those of the deer, elk, and antelope. We saw some beautiful elk antlers, and many broad white skulls of the buffalo, some of them still with the thick black horns on them. As we were watching the loading of the bones Ollie suddenly exclaimed:
"Oh, see the pretty little deer!"
We looked around, and saw, in the front yard of a house, a young antelope, standing by the fence, and also watching the bone-men as they worked.
"It is a beautiful creature, isn't it?" said Jack. "And how happy and contented it looks!"
"I guess it's happy because it isn't in the bone-pile," said Ollie.
We went over to it, and found it so tame that it allowed Ollie to pet it as much as he pleased. The man who owned it told us that he had found it among the Sand Hills, with one foot caught in a little bridge on the railroad, where it had apparently tried to cross. He rescued it just before a train came along.
We left Rushville after a rather longer stop for noon than we usually made. Nothing worthy of mention occurred during the afternoon, and that night we camped on the edge of another small town, called Hay Springs.
"I don't know," said Jack, "whether or not they really have springs here that flow with water and hay, or how it got its funny name. If there are that kind of springs, I think it's a pity there can't be some of them in the Sand Hills."
Jack went over town after supper for some postage-stamps, and came back quite excited.
"Found it at last, Ollie!" he exclaimed. "Grandpa Oldberry was right."
"What--a varmint?" asked Ollie.
"A genuine varmint," answered Jack. "A regular painter. It's in a cage, to be sure, but it may get out during the night."
We all went over to see it. It was in a big box back of a hotel, and the man in charge called it a mountain-lion, and said it was caught up in the Black Hills. "Right where we're going," whispered Ollie. The animal was, I presume, really a jaguar, and was a big cat three or four feet long.
We were off again the next morning, looking forward eagerly to the camp for the night, which we expected would be at Chadron, and where our course would change to the north into Dakota again, this time on the extreme western edge, and carry us up to the mountains. Most of the day we travelled through a rougher country, and saw many buttes--steep-sided, flat-topped mounds; and in the neighborhood of Bordeaux the road wound among scattering pine-trees.
We camped at noon near the house of a settler who seemed to have a dog farm, as the place was overrun with the animals. We needed some corn for the horses, and asked him if he had any to sell. He was a queer looking man, with hair the color of molasses candy, and skim-milk eyes.
"Waal, now, stranger, I jess reckon I have got some co'n to sell," he said. "The only trouble with that there co'n o' mine is that it ain't shucked. If you wouldn't mind to go out into the field and shuck it out, we can jess make a deal right here."
We finally gave him fifty cents for all our three sacks would hold, and he pointed out the field a quarter of a mile away and went back to the house. We noticed that he very soon mounted a pony and rode away towards Hay Springs, but thought nothing of it. When we were ready to start we drove over to the cornfield to get what we had paid for. Jack put his head out of the wagon, took a long look, and said:
"That's the sickest-looking cornfield I ever saw!"
We got out, and found a sorry prospect. The corn was poor and scattering and choked with weeds.
"And the worst of it," called Jack, as he waded out into the weeds, "is that it has been harvested about twelve times already. The scoundrel has been selling it to every man that came along for a month, and I don't believe there were three sackfuls in the whole field to start with."
We went to work at it, and found that he was not far from right.
"No wonder the old skeesicks went off to town soon as he got his money," I said. "He won't show himself back here till he is sure we have gone."
We worked for an hour, and managed to fill one bag with "nubbins," and gave up, promising ourselves that we wouldn't be imposed upon in that way again.
We reached Chadron in due time, and went into camp a little way beyond, on the banks of the White River, a stream which flows through Dakota and finally joins the Missouri. Our camp was on a little flat where the river bends around in the shape of a horseshoe. It seemed to be a popular stopping-place, and there were half a dozen other covered wagons in camp there. The number of empty tin cans scattered about on that piece of ground must have run up into the thousands. But there had not been a mile of the road since we left Valentine which had not had from a dozen to several hundred cans scattered along it, left by former "movers." We had contributed our share, including the gooseberry can. From the labels we noticed on the can windrow along the road it seemed that peaches and Boston baked beans were the favorite things consumed by the overland travellers, though there were a great many green-corn, tomato, and salmon cans.
"You can get every article of food in tin cans now," observed Jack one day, "except my pancakes. I'm going to start a pancake cannery. I'll label my cans 'Jack's Celebrated Rattletrap Pancakes--Warranted Free from Injurious Substances. Open this end. Soak two weeks before using.'"
It was a pretty camping-place on the little can-covered fiat, and we sat up late, visiting with our neighbors and talking about the Black Hills.
"I think," said Jack, as we stumbled over the cans on our way to the Rattletrap, "that I'll go into the mining business up there myself. I'll just back the Blacksmith's Pet up to the side of a mountain, tickle his heels with a straw, and he'll have a gold-mine kicked out inside of five minutes."
