Lanky had become intensely interested in the narratives of Joe and his apprentices. He was happy that he had been assigned to the same guard. All during the day he had been trying to think of the most pregnant question to put when the day’s work should be over, and he should again sit with the windy trio around the campfire. He thought of one that he felt sure would elicit an interesting yarn.
“What,” he asked Joe, “was the narrowest escape you ever had?”
Joe pulled out a shuck. He reached leisurely the sack of Bull Durham in his vest pocket. He rolled the cigarette with deliberation. He was not going to play the fool by committing himself in any superlative way until he had heard from his upstart rivals, young men trying to usurp the arts and prerogatives universally recognized as belonging to the old.
“Well,” he said, “that would be hard to say, hard to say. When a man knocks around as much as I have, and in the days when the West was wild, too, he’s bound to of had many a close call, what with Mex’cans, rustlers, bad men, stampedes, blizzards, and the like. However, one of the worst sceres I ever had was once when I got caught in a buffalo stampede. I reckon you know somethin’ about the buffalo?”
“Yes,” said Lanky, “I’ve read a little bit about them.”
“Well,” said Joe, “I can’t say as I’ve read very much about ’em. I seen the plains black with ’em. And I’ve killed a many a one in my day, too.
“Well, I started out to tell you what a close shave I had one time at Buffalo Gap. I was a fool young buck then, and one mornin’ in the spring after I first hit that country, I heard a great roarin’ and bellowin’, and I listened a while, wonderin’ what it was. Then I says to myself, ‘I bet that’s a buffalo herd;’ for I had heard the old-timers tell about ’em, and how they come through the pass called Buffalo Gap every spring, goin’ north.
“I rides up on one of the hills that overlooks the Gap so as I could look right down on the beasts as they come by. There I stops to see ’em pass. I didn’t git there much too soon, for right away the whole pass was choked with buffalo as thick as they could crowd; jammed in closer than steers in a stock car.
“I was ridin’ a fool bronc, and he got to rearin’ and pitchin’, and the first thing I knowed, we was rollin’ down the hill together. Well, the hoss turned three or four cats in the air, and first he was on top and then I was, but the critter lit feet down right on top of the backs of them buffalo; and I was still in the saddle and didn’t have no bones broke. Don’t ask me whether I pulled leather or not, Lanky; don’t ask me that.
“Well, them brutes begun to run, and the first thing I knowed they was in a regular stampede. I seen what was happenin’. They was carryin’ me and that hoss north jest as fast as they could run, which was purty fast. Yes, sir, purty fast.