"What do you want to see Goff about?" he asked.
I told him I wanted to get some flour of him; had heard that he had quite a lot on hand.
"All right; I'm John Goff; turn round and follow me," which I did, and found his camp two miles from where I supposed it was, and in a different direction.
After we reached his camp he treated me like a nobleman. Said when he first saw me he "felt a little suspicious, on account of one of the hunters north of him having some hides stolen a few days before; and he did not know but I might be the same party." He added that he was "not particularly given to suspicion; but having only heard of the theft the evening before, and seeing me on his hunting-grounds the next day, led him to be somewhat suspicious." He said the northern hunters were just north of him, and the Quinn boys east of him; but that he thought the parties that had stolen the hides were meat-hunters from the edge of the settlement on the Clear fork of the Brazos.
I told him that I belonged to one of the northern outfits, and stated the facts of our case just as they existed, whereupon, he let me have 300 pounds of flour, stating to me that the buffaloes would soon pass north, and he would break up his camp as soon as the bulk of the herd had passed.
From him I learned that a man named Hickey was at Fort Griffin as agent for Lobenstein & Company, of Leavenworth, Kansas, with instructions to buy all the buffalo-hides offered for sale; to pay for them on the range and haul them to Fort Worth, Texas, with freight teams. He also gave me the price-list that Hickey was paying. I stayed all night at Goff's, and at daylight the next morning Goff piloted me out a near way to the open plain, where I called his attention to a landmark near our camp. We parted with the usual parting salutation, "so-long," a phrase common on the frontier for "good-by."
At 2 P. M. I was in our own camp, and not a soul there to greet me. Upon looking around I soon satisfied myself that all were busy skinning buffaloes. Charlie's hunting-horse was close hobbled near camp, his saddle lying by the tepee that we slept in, and a big pile of empty shells were lying by the ammunition-box.
I unhitched and turned out my team; built a fire, and pitched into bread-making. We had been living on sour-dough bread for the last month, and the boys had now gone five days without any bread. So I got of Goff a five-pound can of baking-powder; and I had an agreeable surprise and a bountiful supply of baking-powder biscuits for the boys when they came into camp, which was just as the sun went down.
It did seem to me that if I had been gone a year there could not have been a more joyful meeting. They all agreed that the old saying that "bread is the staff of life" was true, and that I was indeed fortunate both in going and coming through that apparently endless mass of buffaloes; for as I came back through them there seemed to be but little difference in the solidity of the herd from the day before; and within gunshot of camp as I drove in there were hundreds of them moving northward. Charlie had killed 197 the afternoon before, and took his knives and went early the next morning with the boys about one and one-half miles to help skin those buffaloes. Cyrus, Frank and Dockum had skinned forty-six the same evening they were killed.