Before leaving Camp Carlin on this first trip The Boy had time to write home and receive a reply. He told a relative what he had done, and the reply was a stinging rebuke and almost a final farewell, for the relative said nothing good could possibly result from quitting a job with a railroad paying $100 a month and taking one as a teamster at the same figure—"and you nothing but a sickly boy." But the relative was wrong, although excusable.
And now, after all the evidence is in, we find that the "sickly" youngster is still in the land of the living, past three score years, and with some prospects of another score!
The letter left a sore spot, and The Boy foolishly decided that he was cut off. So he did not write again for nearly two years.
The middle of the second winter found him at Fort Fetterman, living in a dug-out in the embankment of a creek bottom, waiting for the springtime when he could again use his stout lungs in shouting at his bulls, but his strong arms were not idle the while, for he chopped cottonwood, box elder and pine logs for the Fetterman commissary.
In those days there was naught but military law, and the civilians were under more or less surveillance, and it was customary for them to report at given periods to the sergeant who sat in the adjutant's adobe office in the fort.
On one of those occasions The Boy's attention was directed to a bulletin board upon which was tacked a card carrying the caption in big black types:
"INFORMATION WANTED"
Under this was The Boy's name, a detailed description of him when he left Cheyenne, and the statement that "anyone knowing his whereabouts will confer a favor upon his anxious father and sister and receive a reward if word is sent to Thomas Jefferson, a friend of the family at Sherman, Wyoming Territory," to whom an appeal had been made. It was stated in the notice that he "weighs about 100 pounds, has black hair, black eyes, and is pale and sickly."
At this time The Boy weighed nearly 170, was brown as a berry, had muscles of an athlete, and in no wise resembled the description. He had no difficulty in convincing the sergeant that while the name was similar to his own it evidently was the description of a tenderfoot, and he was no tenderfoot—not then.