In a burst of confidence a few days before his death he told me he had endured the worst kind of hardships all his life. Winter and summer he had lived on the plains and in the mountains without shelter, by open campfires, lots of times without much to eat; had been hunted and shot at for days and nights by Cheyenne Injuns and never met with the privations and discomforts he had on this trip. And as for slowness, he said he hired out one time in Texas when he was a boy, to help drive 900 tame ducks across the swamps of Louisiana to New Orleans to market; said the trail was so narrow that only one duck at a time could walk in it and sometimes no trail at all, just high grass and swamp brush, and yet they beat the time of a cattle special away yonder.
THE SPIRIT OF PACKSADDLE FOLLOWS THE DEAD COW.
A stock train was waiting on a sidetrack one day
For gravel trains going some other way;
And as they waited the cattle grew old,
The stockmen grew haggard, the weather turned cold.
Their stomachs were empty, they were starving in fact,
While the stock train was waiting on its lonely sidetrack.
The reports said the markets were lower each day,
While the cattle grew thinner, the stockmen grew grey.
An old, grizzled cattleman spoke up at last,
Said he to the cowboys, "The time it is past,
To make mon out of cattle or get any dough,
This going to market by rail is a little too slow.
"The railroad companies' tariffs get higher each year,
Their passes get fewer, till I very much fear
That ahead of our stock train we will have to walk
And wait for the cattle train to get up our stock.
"Let us up and be doing and build a big merger trust,
And sell stock to suckers and let them go bust,
And for every steer issue millions of shares,
Let other people worry how to get railroad fares.
"We will issue bonds and certificates and thus raise our stock;
In place of breeding Shorthorns we will make a swift talk;
Have our shares all printed in red, green and gold,
Sell them in the stock market to the young and the old.
"And thus live by our cuteness and work of our brains
In place of starving on special stock trains.
We will have servants and waiters, the best in the land;
Governors and princes will give us the glad hand."
Just then the front brakeman stuck in his head,
Saying in the car next the engine an old cow was dead.
The old cowman gave a gasp and his spirit started to ride
To round up that old cow that in the front car had just died.
[CHAPTER XX.]
A Cowboy Enoch Arden.
Just after leaving North Platte, a train of immigrants on their way from Oregon to Arkansas with mule teams went by us, and we found they had a letter for us from Eatumup Jake, who had returned to Utah long ere this to look after his domestic matters. One of the reasons why he abandoned us was to return and look after the education of the twin boys. However, the main reason was that so many reports had come to us from travelers in wagons and sheepherders trailing sheep east, who had come through our neighborhood in Utah, who said that all our friends had given us up for dead, and Eatumup Jake's wife, after putting on mourning for a proper season, had begun to receive the attentions of a widower, who was part Gentile bishop and part Mormon elder.
As Jake was in a hurry when he started back home, he bought him a cheap mustang in place of accepting the transportation which was urged on him by all the principal officers of the railroad. He wrote us that when he arrived on his ranch, his wife was out in the hayfield putting up the third crop of alfalfa. She was driving a bull rake, hauling it into the stack, while one of the twins was driving the mower and the other twin was doing the stacking. The half-breed Mormon-Gentile bishop was standing round with a cotton umbrella over his head, giving orders. Jake's wife didn't know him at first, he had changed so, but the bishop tumbled to him at once and started to leave. However, Jake overtook him and persuaded the bishop to turn aside into a little patch of timber with him, and Jake getting the loan of the umbrella in the painful interview that followed, he left most of the steel ribs of the umbrella sticking in the anatomy of the bishop, and then let the house dog, with the help of the twin boys armed with their pitchforks, assist the bishop clear off the ranch. This was so much better than the old style of Enoch Arden business that Dillbery Ike made up a little rhyme about it after we got Jake's letter, and here it is: