The wagon train certainly was having a time of it. Those stranger hunters, from down the river, had driven the buffaloes straight into the teams. The cavvy of loose cattle and mules had scattered; ox-teams had broken their yokes or had stampeded with the wagons. Several wagons were over-turned; and a big buffalo was galloping away with an ox-yoke entangled in his horns. Wild Bill overhauled him in short order and returned with the yoke; but hither and thither across the field were racing and chasing other men, ahorse and afoot, trying to gather the train together again.
By the time that the buffalo charge had passed on through and the animals were making off into the distance, most of the train’s hunters had arrived. The other hunters, from below, also arrived. They proved to be a party of emigrants, for California, who did not understand how to hunt buffalo. In fact, they had not killed a single one. However, Lew Simpson gave them a pretty dressing down for their carelessness.
“You’ve held us up for a day, at least,” he stormed; “and you’ve done us several hundred dollars’ worth of damage besides.”
“Well-nigh killed that boy, too,” spoke somebody. “Did you see him peel that shirt? Haw-haw! Slipped out of it quicker’n a snake goin’ through a holler log!”
“Little Billy came a-runnin’, though,” reminded somebody else.
“Yep; but didn’t save the shirt!”
That was true—everybody agreed that Davy would not have been saved had he not acted promptly. He was given another shirt (a blue one) to take the place of the one sacrificed to the big buffalo.
The California party rode away, taking a little meat that Lew Simpson offered them after they had properly apologized for their clumsiness. The rest of the day was spent in cutting up the buffaloes, and in repairing the wagons and harness. Not until the next noon was the train able to resume its creaking way, down the Platte River trail, for the Missouri River at Fort Leavenworth.
About twenty miles a day were covered now, regularly, and during the days Davy learned considerable about a “bull train” on the plains. He learned that he was lucky to ride instead of walk; nearly everybody with a bull train walked. However, this train was travelling almost empty, back from Fort Laramie, on the North Platte River in western Nebraska (for Nebraska Territory extended to the middle of present Wyoming), to Fort Leavenworth in eastern Kansas Territory. It was accompanied by a lot of government employes, who did not work for the train, and these rode if they could furnish their own mules. Lew Simpson, the wagon boss, and George Woods, the assistant wagon boss, Billy the extra hand, and the herder, rode, because that was the custom; all the other employes walked.