Featherbed was here promoted to the position of assistant wagon boss, presented with a big sorrel horse called "America" (because he was not Indian-bred) and given the lead team to drive in the outfit. This meant that, in co-operation with the "big boss," he would help select the camps, govern the speed of the "train," look after the manifests, act as check clerk in loading and unloading, and besides wear a red sash to designate his official position.
Featherbed took his honors modestly, in fact he was surprised and couldn't understand it until someone told him the "old man" was pleased when he (Featherbed) took the wounded horse back to the train, saddled up another and returned to help find where the arrows came from.
CHAPTER V
Rattlesnakes and Redskins.
The night-herder's song awoke me at four a. m.—the first streak of day—and I didn't have time to pull on my boots before the bulls were inside the corral; so, in bare feet, I yoked my fourteen head and then proceeded to pull on the cowhides, roll up my blankets and throw them on my trail wagon. Due to the haste—for nearly everyone else in the outfit was ready to "pull out" in response to the assistant wagon boss' order—I proceeded to pull on the left boot without the usual precautions. My fingers were in the straps as I sat on the ground,[1] and in another minute my toes would have been in the boot. But the rattler that had spent the night in it stuck out his head. I shook him out, first calling my pard to come with his whip.
After the rattler was dead I plucked off eleven beautifully graduated white rattles and a black button, later on adding them to a hatband of several hundred which I had sewn together, using silk thread and a cambric needle. The other boot was tenantless.
The blankets, in a neat roll secured by a heavy leather strap, were thrown on top of the freight in the trailer, and away we went for a dry camp in the bad lands, where we spent six hours of the middle of the day hiding under our wagons to escape the hot rays of the sun.
A late afternoon start ended at nine p. m., in a moonlit camp on a creek that ran swiftly through chalk-like bluffs—perhaps the headwaters of the Niobrara river. In those days none but a geographer or a government surveyor knew the names of many of the waterways, if they had names. It had been a hard drive through deep sand most of the way, and after the bulls had been relieved of their yokes and the chains that held the teams together, all hands raced for the water, both for internal and external purposes.