We encountered a big crowd in front of one of the markets, and found that a hunter had just come in from the mountains to the west with the carcass of the biggest bear ever brought into Rapid City. Some said it was a grizzly, and others a silvertip, and one man tried to settle the difficulty by saying that there wasn't any difference between them. But it was certainly a big bear, and filled the whole wagon-box. Ollie sidled through the crowd and asked so many questions of the man, who was named Reynolds, that he good-naturedly gave Ollie one of the largest of the claws. It was five inches long.
At noon we went down to the camp of the freighters on the outskirts of town, near Rapid Creek. There must have been fifty "outfits"--Jack said that was the right word--and several hundred mules, as many oxen, and a few horses. The animals were, most of them, wandering about wherever they pleased, the mules and horses taking their dinner out of nosebags, and the mules keeping up a gentle exercise by kicking at one another. It seemed a hopeless confusion, but the men were sitting about on the ground, calmly cooking their dinners over little camp-fires. One man, whom we had got acquainted with in the morning at Smith's, asked us to have dinner with him, and made the invitation so pressing that we accepted. He had several gallon's of coffee and plenty of bacon and canned fruit, and a peculiar kind of bread which he had baked himself.
"I'm a-thinking," he said, "there ain't enough sal'ratus in that there bread; but I'm a poor cook, anyhow."
The bread seemed to us to be already composed chiefly of saleratus, so his apology struck us as unnecessary. He very kindly wrote out the receipt on a shingle for Jack, but I stole it away from him after we got home and burned it in the camp-fire; so we escaped that.
"Your pancakes are bad enough," I said to him. "We don't care to try your saleratus bread."
Jack was a good deal worked up about the loss of his receipt, and experimented a long time to produce something like the freighter's bread without it; but as Snoozer wouldn't try the stuff he made, and he was afraid to do so himself, nothing came of it.
We enjoyed our dinner with the man, however, and Jack added further to his vocabulary in finding that the drivers of the ox teams were called "bullwhackers," and those of the mules and horses "muleskinners."
In the afternoon we climbed the hill above our camp. It gave us a long view off to the east across the level country, while away to the west were the mountain-peaks rising higher and higher. It was still cold, and the raw northeast wind moaned through the pines in a way that made us think of winter.