It was not “Little Billy Cody” now—the slender boy whose boots had seemed too large for him even when he was riding Pony Express. It was “Scout Cody”—a man with wide, piercing brown eyes, long wavy yellow hair, a silky light-brown moustache, a pair of broad shoulders above a wiry waist, and an alert, springy step. But he was “Billy Cody” after all.
He and Wild Bill Hickok had been serving together with the Union army in Missouri and Arkansas; and now he was at Leavenworth on a furlough from detached duty at St. Louis.
He could give Davy only a half hour; Davy heard some of his adventures and learned also that “Mother Cody” had gone (what a brave, sweet woman she had been!), and that the Cody home in Salt Creek Valley had been broken up. Truly, the West was undergoing great changes.
Greater changes still occurred in the next three years. Dave entered West Point in June of the next summer, 1865, and for the succeeding two years he studied hard. When he was given his furlough he spent part of it with General Brown, who, luckily, was stationed at Fort Leavenworth.
The two years at the Military Academy had formed a different boy of Dave. The strict discipline had taught him how to make the most of his time, and the constant drill exercises had straightened him up and trained all his muscles as well as his mind. He felt quite like a man as he shook hands with the general and met his approving eye.
One of his first questions to the general, after the greetings and polite inquiries, was about Billy Cody.
“‘Billy’ Cody, you say?” laughed the general. “Haven’t you been reading the papers?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t, general,” confessed Dave. “We don’t have much time to read the papers at the Academy, you know.”
“That’s so,” chuckled the general. “You don’t. But your friend and mine, Billy Cody, has a new name. He’s now ‘Buffalo Bill.’ He’s been supplying buffalo meat to the grading contractors on the Kansas Pacific. They need about twelve buffalo a day, and he took the job for $500 a month. It’s been a dangerous business, and he hunts alone out on the plains, with one man following in a wagon to do the butchering and load the meat, and the Indians are always trying to get Bill’s scalp. So far he’s outwitted them, and he’s been bringing in the meat so regularly that at night when he rides in the boys in the camps yell: ‘Here comes old Bill with more buffalo!’ and ‘Buffalo Bill’ he is. He’s been married, too, you know.”