While dinner was being cooked and the bulls were herded off to water and graze, the men lounged in the shade of their wagons. Dinner was the same as supper and breakfast: fat salt pork or “sowbelly,” which came to the plate in slabs six or eight inches thick; hot bread baked in the kettle-like Dutch ovens; beans from the supply baked in the ashes the night before; and black coffee with sugar. That was the regulation until the buffalo and antelope country was reached. The last of the sugar was used, too; after this camp, all the way to Denver the coffee would be sugarless. But that was only ordinary. Nobody objected to the menu; appetites were splendid.
“Here,” spoke Joel, after dinner, rising, to Dave. “I said I’d show you how to pop a whip, didn’t I?”
“Joel can do it, all right,” approved Charley; and several other men nodded, agreeing with him.
And Bull Whacker Joel could. A heavy thing was that whip; the lash, of braided buffalo hide, was eighteen feet long and thick like a snake in the middle. It had a cracker of buck-skin, six inches long, split at the end; and a hickory stock eighteen inches long. Joel said it cost eighteen dollars in Leavenworth. Flicking it forward, from where it trailed on the ground, he landed the tip wherever he wished. With the cracker he picked up small objects at the full extent of the lash; he snipped the tips from the sage and cut blossoms; and how he “popped”!
“He’s a boss bull-whip slinger,” laughed Charley, approvingly. “You’ll never see a better one to pick flies off the lead team.”
“I’ve seen others,” uttered Yank, who somehow appeared to have a grudge against the train. “These fancy tricks will do for show, but give me the man who can spot a bull twenty feet off an’ take a piece of hide out with the cracker. I don’t want no fancy fly-killer in my train. Bull whips are made for business.”
“You don’t want bull whackers; you want butchers,” retorted Joel, contemptuously. “Here, Dave, try your luck. Give him room, boys.”
Dave tried, but the long lash on the short handle proved a queer thing to handle. It persisted in flying crooked or falling short, and several times he almost hanged himself or narrowly escaped losing an ear. However, before he surrendered the whip to Joel he had got the knack of popping it; that was something.
“Hurray!” encouraged Joel. “We’ll make a bull whacker of you before the end of this trip. You’ll be able to pop a whip with the best of us.”
Davy scarcely expected this skill; but he was resolved to do so well that he could show Billy Cody.