For a few days after leaving Leavenworth we kept the dog, Found, tied up, lest he should go back to his master; but we were all kind to him, and he showed no inclination to quit our company, and when we turned him loose again he contentedly remained with our outfit.
We found the roads fine and the weather real Indian summer; days hazy, warm, and pleasant, nights cool, and mornings frosty, as is usual on the plains at this the most pleasant time of the year.
While in the settlements we indulged in such luxuries as milk, butter, eggs, and so forth, whenever they were to be bought, and we killed plenty of prairie-chickens with our shotgun.
These prairie-chickens were very numerous in the Kansas settlements, occurring in such multitudes that they were pests to the farmers, eating great quantities of grain. They haunted the settled country or grain-producing parts but were seldom found far out on the plains, though while in the service I saw a few as far west as the Big Bend of the Arkansas.
In the army the Sibley tent was calculated to hold twelve to sixteen men—crowded pretty close together—but in our Sibley, with only the three occupants, there was room for stove, mess-chest, camp-stools, or anything else we might bring inside. Found always made his bed under the wagon, where he could keep watch over the animals and act as general camp guard.
In order to favor our team we made two drives a day, stopping for an hour or so at noon to turn the animals out on the grass, while we made coffee and ate some cold meat and bread. On our afternoon drive, as night approached, we selected a convenient place and camped, turning out the team—except the flea-bitten gray mare, which we always picketed as an anchor to the rest. After supper, sprawled on our beds in the tent, we talked and spun yarns.
Tom having served three enlistments—fifteen years—and Jack two, while I had only five years' service as a soldier to my credit, I was considered a raw recruit and usually listened while they talked. When in a musical mood, Jack got out his fiddle and played and sang.
We seldom lit a candle at night, for we had only one box of candles and knew that before us were many long winter evenings when lights would be more needed than now. We had found, rolled up in the tent, an infantry bayonet—the best kind of a camp candlestick. When we had occasion to light a candle we appreciated its convenience.
Since we first came from the plains into the Kansas settlements we had heard much said about jayhawkers. The term jayhawking as used then was a modified expression for theft or robbery, but was applied more particularly to the depredations of gangs of armed and mounted ruffians, who, taking advantage of the turbulent condition of affairs resulting from the war—the civil law being impotent or altogether lacking in many parts of the scattering settlements of Kansas—roamed at will through the country, hovering especially along main thoroughfares and helping themselves to other people's property. Sometimes they professed to be volunteer soldiers or government agents sent out to gather in good horses, mules, or other property for the use of Uncle Sam, giving bogus receipts for what they took and saying that these receipts would be honored and paid on their presentation to any government quartermaster—which, of course, was pure fiction.
Where they failed to get what they wanted by other methods they did not hesitate to use violence, even to killing those who resisted their demands.