There seemed to be but one thing to do, so I said: "It was
your corn, I suppose. Our only excuse is that we were out of
corn. Tell us how much it is, and we'll pay you for it."
"Not a cent," answered the man, firmly. "It's all right. I've
travelled through them Sand Hills myself, and I know how it is.
You're welcome to all you took, and you can have another sackful
if you want to go after it."
I thanked him, but told him that we expected to get some feed
at Gordon, the next town. After wishing us good-luck, he rode
away.
We started on, and made but a short stop for noon, near
Gordon. We found ourselves in a fairly well-settled country,
though the oldest settlers had been there but two or three years.
The region was called the Antelope Flats, and was quite level,
with occasional ravines. The trail usually ran near the railroad,
and that night we camped within three or four rods of it. Long
trains loaded with cattle thundered by all night. We were
somewhat nervous lest Old Blacky should put his shoulder against
the wagon while we slept, and push it on the track in revenge for
the poor treatment we gave him in the Sand Hills, but the plan
didn't happen to occur to him. It was at this camp that we
encountered a remarkable echoing well. It was an ordinary open
well, forty or fifty feet deep, near a neighboring house, but a
word spoken above it came back repeated a score of times. We
failed to account for it.
The next forenoon we jogged along much the same as usual and
stopped for noon at Rushville. This was not far from the Pine
Ridge Indian Agency and the place called Wounded Knee, where the
battle with the Sioux was fought three or four years later. We
saw a number of Indians here, and though they came up to Ollie's
idea of what an Indian should be a little better than the one
that rode with us, they still did not seem to be just the thing.
[Illustration: A Study in Red Men]
"I don't think," he said, "that they ought to smoke
cigarettes."
"It does look like rather small business for an Indian,
doesn't it?" answered Jack. "But then smoking cigarettes is small
business for anybody. What's your idea of what an Indian ought to
smoke?"
"Well, I'm not sure he ought to smoke anything, except of
coarse the peace-pipe occasionally. And he oughtn't to smoke that
very much, because an Indian shouldn't make peace very often."
"Right on the war-path all the time, flourishing a
scalping-knife above his head, and whooping his teeth
loose--that's your notion of an Indian."
"Well, I don't know as that is exactly it," returned Ollie,
doubtfully. "But it seems to me these are hardly right. Their
clothes seem to be just like white people's."
"I don't know about that," said Jack. "I saw one when I went
around to the post-office wearing bright Indian moccasins, a pair
of soldier's trousers, a fashionable black coat, and a cowboy
hat. I never saw a white man dressed just like that."
"Well, I think they ought to wear some feathers, anyhow,"
insisted Ollie. "An Indian without feathers is just like a--a
turkey without 'em."
The Indians were idling all over town, big, lazy,
villanous-looking fellows, and very frequently they were smoking
cigarettes, and often they were dressed much as Jack had
described, though their clothes varied a good deal. There were
two points which they all had in common, however--they were all
dirty, and all carried bright, clean repeating-rifles, We
wondered why they needed the rifles, since there was no game in
the neighborhood.
The chief business of Rushville seemed to be shipping bones.
We went over to the railroad to watch the process. There were
great piles of them about the station, and men were loading them
into freight-cars.
"What's done with them?" we asked of a man.
"Shipped East, and ground up for fertilizer," he answered.
"Where do they all come from?"
"Picked up about the country everywhere. Men make a business
of gathering them and bringing them in at so much a load. Supply
won't last many months longer, but it's good business now."
They were chiefly buffalo bones, though there were also those
of the deer, elk, and antelope. We saw some beautiful elk
antlers, and many broad white skulls of the buffalo, some of them
still with the thick black horns on them. As we were watching the
loading of the bones Ollie suddenly exclaimed:
"Oh, see the pretty little deer!"
We looked around, and saw, in the front yard of a house, a
young antelope, standing by the fence, and also watching the
bone-men as they worked.
"It is a beautiful creature, isn't it?" said Jack. "And how
happy and contented it looks!"
"I guess it's happy because it isn't in the bone-pile," said
Ollie.
We went over to it, and found it so tame that it allowed
Ollie to pet it as much as he pleased. The man who owned it told
us that he had found it among the Sand Hills, with one foot
caught in a little bridge on the railroad, where it had
apparently tried to cross. He rescued it just before a train came
along.
We left Rushville after a rather longer stop for noon than we
usually made. Nothing worthy of mention occurred during the
afternoon, and that night we camped on the edge of another small
town, called Hay Springs.
"I don't know," said Jack, "whether or not they really have
springs here that flow with water and hay, or how it got its
funny name. If there are that kind of springs, I think it's a
pity there can't be some of them in the Sand Hills."
Jack went over town after supper for some postage-stamps, and
came back quite excited.
"Found it at last, Ollie!" he exclaimed. "Grandpa Oldberry
was right."
"What--a varmint?" asked Ollie.
"A genuine varmint," answered Jack. "A regular painter. It's
in a cage, to be sure, but it may get out during the night."
We all went over to see it. It was in a big box back of a
hotel, and the man in charge called it a mountain-lion, and said
it was caught up in the Black Hills. "Right where we're going,"
whispered Ollie. The animal was, I presume, really a jaguar, and
was a big cat three or four feet long.
We were off again the next morning, looking forward eagerly
to the camp for the night, which we expected would be at Chadron,
and where our course would change to the north into Dakota again,
this time on the extreme western edge, and carry us up to the
mountains. Most of the day we travelled through a rougher
country, and saw many buttes--steep-sided, flat-topped mounds;
and in the neighborhood of Bordeaux the road wound among
scattering pine-trees. We camped at noon near the house of a
settler who seemed to have a dog farm, as the place was overrun
with the animals. We needed some corn for the horses, and
asked him if he had any to sell. He was a queer looking man, with
hair the color of molasses candy, and skim-milk eyes.
[Illustration: A Good Salesman]
"Waal, now, stranger, I jess reckon I have got some co'n to
sell," he said. "The only trouble with that there co'n o' mine is
that it ain't shucked. If you wouldn't mind to go out into the
field and shuck it out, we can jess make a deal right here."
We finally gave him fifty cents for all our three sacks would
hold, and he pointed out the field a quarter of a mile away and
went back to the house. We noticed that he very soon mounted a
pony and rode away towards Hay Springs, but thought nothing of
it. When we were ready to start we drove over to the cornfield to
get what we had paid for. Jack put his head out of the wagon,
took a long look, and said:
"That's the sickest-looking cornfield I ever saw!"
We got out, and found a sorry prospect. The corn was poor and
scattering and choked with weeds.
"And the worst of it," called Jack, as he waded out into the
weeds, "is that it has been harvested about twelve times already.
The scoundrel has been selling it to every man that came along
for a month, and I don't believe there were three sackfuls in the
whole field to start with."
We went to work at it, and found that he was not far from
right.
"No wonder the old skeesicks went off to town soon as he got
his money," I said. "He won't show himself back here till he is
sure we have gone."
We worked for an hour, and managed to fill one bag with
"nubbins," and gave up, promising ourselves that we wouldn't be
imposed upon in that way again.
We reached Chadron in due time, and went into camp a little
way beyond, on the banks of the White River, a stream which flows
through Dakota and finally joins the Missouri. Our camp was on a
little flat where the river bends around in the shape of a
horseshoe. It seemed to be a popular stopping-place, and there
were half a dozen other covered wagons in camp there. The number
of empty tin cans scattered about on that piece of ground must
have run up into the thousands. But there had not been a mile of
the road since we left Valentine which had not had from a dozen
to several hundred cans scattered along it, left by former
"movers." We had contributed our share, including the gooseberry
can. From the labels we noticed on the can windrow along the road
it seemed that peaches and Boston baked beans were the favorite
things consumed by the overland travellers, though there were a
great many green-corn, tomato, and salmon cans.
"You can get every article of food in tin cans now," observed
Jack one day, "except my pancakes. I'm going to start a pancake
cannery. I'll label my cans 'Jack's Celebrated Rattletrap
Pancakes--Warranted Free from Injurious Substances. Open this
end. Soak two weeks before using.'"
It was a pretty camping-place on the little can-covered fiat,
and we sat up late, visiting with our neighbors and talking about
the Black Hills.
"I think," said Jack, as we stumbled over the cans on our way
to the Rattletrap, "that I'll go into the mining business up
there myself. I'll just back the Blacksmith's Pet up to the side
of a mountain, tickle his heels with a straw, and he'll have a
gold-mine kicked out inside of five minutes."