IX
THE HEE-HAW EXPRESS
Now Billy wasted no time with the preparations. That was his style. The Reverend Mr. Baxter, who had been ill in Leavenworth, and so had not started before, promptly agreed to join the party. He and Billy and Dave clubbed together with an outfit that Billy knew. These were Jim Barber and Hi Wilson and another man called “Left-over Joe.” Jim and Hi had been teamsters with Russell, Majors & Waddell bull trains; but “Left-over Joe” seemed to be nobody in particular—and that is why they nicknamed him “Left-over Joe.”
A big emigrant outfitting camp had been established in the Salt Creek Valley near the Cody home, and while Jim and Hi were here getting ready to move on, this lean, lank, very long-necked hobbledehoy of squeaky voice and nineteen or twenty years had wandered into their camp and adopted them. So they let him stay.
Jim and Hi had a team of mules: Billy and Dave and Mr. Baxter added an old light wagon. The party thought themselves lucky, for oxen had risen in price to $175 and $200 a yoke, and mules and horses were scarcer yet. Wagons were scarce, too.
By the time that the supplies of salty pork and beans and flour and coffee had been laid in for “grub,” and picks and spades and gold-pans for digging out the gold and separating it, and ammunition for killing game and fighting Indians, Davy’s money was about gone. However, that did not matter. They all would find gold enough to last them the rest of their lives!
Billy owned the Mississippi “yager” smoothbore musket and the two Colt’s navy revolvers that he had used when in the mule fort. He gave Davy one of the revolvers. With it belted at his waist, Davy felt like a regular scout indeed. Hi and Jim also owned guns. Hi’s was a yager similar to Billy’s. Jim’s was a heavy Sharp’s “Old Reliable” rifle, of fifty calibre holding six cartridges underneath, and one in the breech. It was a tremendously hard-shooting gun. Whoever had a Sharp’s “Old Reliable” had the best gun on the plains.
The Reverend Mr. Baxter had no gun at all and did not want one, he claimed. “Left-over Joe” had no gun at all, but wanted one badly. Hi promised to let him shoot the yager sometime.
The Salt Creek camp was a lively place. Here were assembled a thousand emigrants, all “Pike’s Peakers,” making ready to travel on westward and find their fortunes. About every kind of an outfit was to be seen, and all sorts of people. Many of the men never had driven oxen or mules before; they had bought what they could get; some of the animals proved not to be broken to drive, and when the green-horns tried to hitch up the green “critters” then there was fun for the onlookers.
However, nobody was delaying to watch the “fun.” By the hundred, parties were setting out every day from the camp as well as from Leavenworth. Thousands of gold-seekers already had left Omaha and Kansas City and St. Joseph. It was reported that along any of the trails a person could walk from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains on the tops of the prairie schooners—so thick was the travel. It beat the celebrated stampede to California in 1849.