But, old pard, inside of three minutes my strip of green is gone! In its place is the quivering, broiling sun over the yellow bunch-grass; the ashen stalks of the sage seem never to have had a drop of sap in them—everything is dead. Even the jack-rabbit that stops for a look seems bedraggled and forlorn, but I whistle, pick up a moss agate, throw it in my jockey box, and jog along, for the surface is now hard as a stone, though off ahead there I will unwind my lash and send its stinging thongs to the backs of my noble beasts, touching only selected spots where the hair has been worn away until the surface looks like the head of the drum in a village band.
Yes, I know they used to think us bullwhackers were brutes, but they (an occasional tenderfoot) only saw the surface. They had never been initiated; they didn't know the secrets. It was only when the load just had to be yanked to the top without doubling teams or dropping trailers, that we used the undercut which sent the long V-shaped popper upon the tender spots of the belly, and then, Pard, the thing looked worse because the Comanche-like language we hurled with it was so unusual to ears that had been trained east of the Missouri River. It sure was picturesque language!
But we were all day reaching that green belt strung like a ribbon across the face of central Wyoming, and from the time we first hove in sight of it, until we pulled the pins from the steamy yokes, and dropped the hickory bows at our feet, it appeared and disappeared so often that I wonder that both man and beast did not go mad. However, inasmuch as this was a daily programme for me for several years, I know that man can stand a whole lot of hardship, if he only thinks so.
And then ring in the change from the desert heat of midsummer to trifles like thirty below in winter along the same landscape, when you see the ghostly cottonwoods and anticipate your arrival among them some hours later. Won't there be a roaring fire? And beans? And bacon? And pones of bread for everyone? Wet stockings piled on inverted yokes or held on pieces of brush, are drying, we are nursing our chilblains and discussing the incidents of the day's drive, and not a weakling in the outfit. Every man has been frozen or soaked all day, but he's as happy as a lark. Sleep? You bet! You know it; but if you and I tell our friends around our comfortable firesides now or in the lobby of an onyx-walled Waldorf-Astoria, Belmont or Biltmore, that we just kicked a hole in the snow, rolled into our blankets and dreamed of being roasted to death, they would look at your well-shaven face, my biled shirt, and then at your highly polished shoes, then at my black derby, and, dammit, I believe they might be justified in forming the opinion that neither one of us had ever been deprived of breakfast food, or bath tubs, or a manicure artist's services.* * *
You want to know if I can locate any of the old gang. Sure! Some sleep in the sidehills along the swift-flowing waters of the North Platte, one or two are parts of gravel beds down on the wild meadows—or what were the wild meadows of hundreds of square miles between the North Platte and the Poudre; but not a few, like you and I, stalk abroad on the face of the earth—cheating first, as we did, tribes of Sioux, Arapahoe, Cheyenne and the Comanches who swept up across Kansas and Nebraska; escaping the blizzards, periods of starvation, cold, heat, fire, water, whisky, and finally the surgeon's knife. I tell you, the world only thinks it knows a thing or two about how the human body is made, and how much it can stand. But to answer your questions:
Jim Bansom, the last time I knew of him, in 1875, was headed east with a fine span of hosses and a fair-to-middlin' wagon.
Don't know where he went and don't know what he did with the hosses or the wagon! 'Taint none o' my bizness, neither! In those days it wasn't customary to be too gol-darned inquisitive about such things, unless you owned the hosses or the wagon, or a bit, or a halter, or something of that sort you happened to loan to the outfit; and then, of course, you could take the trail if you wanted to.
Sam Smith, old U. P. conductor, walked into my office a while ago, and, as he closed the door behind him, I said, "Hello, Sam; haven't seen you since 1875, but you're the same Sam!" Then I told him my name.
And then Sam gasped and acted like maybe he might pull a gun, thinking me an impostor; because when Sam saw me the last time, stretched out in his caboose on the old mountain division of the U. P., and the train sailing down the toboggan that slid us into Laramie City, past Tie Siding and old Fort Saunders, my hair was black, and I had a different look.