Maybe I looked bad. I guess I did, for I carried a gun and a belt of forty rounds, and a butcher knife in a scabbard, just as we all did, for it was the custom of the country; and I had long hair, too, and it was matted and dirty, mixed with pitch that came from camp-fires in the hills. No doubt I looked wretched, but, old Pard, I didn't even feel that way. I felt good, and I was as harmless as a pigeon.
But I said something about a hatband of rattlers' rattles that I gave his little girl at Cheyenne, as I rode up to his door aboard a cayuse, and that settled it. We talked about snow-sheds, the Sherman hill, once the highest railroad point in the world, and of old times in general.
But what's the use? When you come to New York, I'll meet you at the Waldorf and we'll talk about it all night, and wish the buffalo were still there, and the sagebrush, and the bull-trains, and the other things undisturbed by civilization. So long....
BILL.
New York, August, 1917.
[NOTE—The above letters are from the author's files. "Van" is a multi-millionaire manufacturer living in a middle-western state. For several years his pastime was buffalo hunting and "roughing it" in the wild and woolly west.
The author, when a boy of 16, was developing a case of tuberculosis of the lungs, and to escape the fate that had overtaken other members of his family, took Horace Greeley's advice, went west, and grew up with the country. He had been a clerk in a railroad office, and still is in the railroad business in New York City, more than forty years after the events related in the following chapters. He is the only survivor of a family of fourteen, including all of his own children, eight in number.]