HE PLODDED ALONG WITH THE LAME CATTLE.
IX.
A Kicking Gun and a Bucking Mule.
Here for some days we were traversing a continuous level plain, treeless and trackless, except for the road we traveled, covered with buffalo grass, then turned a beautiful straw color by the sun and dry weather, but still affording excellent pasturage. Not a tree had we seen, none since we crossed the Arkansas.
We were slowly but regularly leaving behind us the monotonous plain, to enter upon a region of great natural beauty and attractiveness. On a beautiful morning after the train had been moving for a short time, the Rabbit Ear mounds were seen, peering up in the distance, through the hazy atmosphere. Yet we were a day’s journey from them. These twin diminutive sentinels of the Rockies, stationed here to the left of our road, could not have been more appropriately named, their resemblance to the ears of a jack-rabbit being strikingly obvious.
A day or two after passing the Rabbit Ears we were fortunate in the beauty and attractiveness of the location of our corral. Immediately west of us the view was limited to a mile or two, shut off by the bluff rim of a stretch of table-land, rising perhaps a hundred feet above our level, the face of the elevation extending north and south, the road we were traveling passing around the base of its southern extremity. About midway of the rim of this plateau of table-land there was a small mound of regular sugar-loaf shape, rising to perhaps the height of twenty feet, on the top pinnacle of which stood a single buck antelope looking at the train as it was starting out just at sunrise. There he stood for some time stock still gazing at us. The morning was absolutely glorious, the perfect weather of New Mexico. I determined to give this solitary buck antelope a trial.
Procuring the big double-barreled shotgun belonging to Captain Chiles, I mounted my horse, riding in almost the opposite direction to that in which the train was moving. The buck held his position until I had ridden nearly opposite him, my course, leaving him nearly half a mile to the left, when he suddenly retired behind the mound. Immediately turning my horse I galloped over the ascending ground until I got within a hundred yards of the base of the mound, dismounted quickly, walked rapidly up to it; then I crawled as quietly as possible nearly to the top. Peeping around so as to get a view of the opposite side, I beheld, forty yards from me, that fine buck, looking intently toward me, with four or five of his companions lying down near him, so close together that I could almost have covered them all with the big shotgun.
Holding the gun in the right hand—it was so heavy that I could scarcely handle it—cocking both barrels, I pushed it out in front of me, and just as I was in the act of placing the breech of the gun against my shoulder, but before I had gotten it fairly in place, off it went, both barrels simultaneously, sounding like a cannon, and kicking me with such force as to turn me over and over, rolling me down nearly to the foot of the mound. The gun struck my face, bruising it badly, making my nose bleed profusely and stunning me, but not so badly but that I noticed the bunch of fine antelope scampering off, frightened, but untouched. My horse stood quietly where I had left him picketed.
Our real character, “Little Breeches,” antedated the poetical child of the fancy of Colonel John Hay, introduced to the public some thirty years ago. Whether this distinguished gentleman had any knowledge of our cavayard driver, I do not know, but in truth the two “Little Breeches” had similar characteristics, both “chawing tebacker” at an early age, and our “Little Breeches” had the additional accomplishment of swearing with emphasis, and articulation unexcelled or unequaled by any of the older and more hardened “bull-whackers” of our train.
