horses they had, if he would consent to pilot us over to within striking distance of the Fort Benton road.  The offer was immediately accepted, and I was dispatched to drive in their horses.  Two of the placer miners accompanied us back to the trail, both riding good saddle horses and leading two others under pack saddles.  We overtook the herd within a mile of the point where the trail was to be abandoned, and after sending the wagon ahead, our foreman asked our guests to pick out any cow or steer in the herd.  When they declined, he cut out a fat stray cow which had come into the herd down on the North Platte, had her driven in after the wagon, killed and quartered.  When we had laid the quarters on convenient rocks to cool and harden during the night, our future pilot timidly inquired what we proposed to do with the hide, and on being informed that he was welcome to it, seemed delighted, remarking, as I helped him to stake it out where it would dry, that “rawhide was mighty handy repairing pack saddles.”

Our visitors interested us, for it is probable that not a man in our outfit had ever seen a miner before, though we had read of the life and were deeply interested in everything they did or said.  They were very plain men and of simple manners, but we had great difficulty in getting them to talk.  After supper, while idling away a couple of hours around our camp-fire, the outfit told stories, in the hope that our guests would become reminiscent and give us some insight into their experiences, Bob Blades leading off.

“I was in a cow town once up on the head of the Chisholm trail at a time when a church fair was being pulled off.  There were lots of old long-horn cowmen living in the town, who owned cattle in that Cherokee Strip that Officer is always talking about.  Well, there’s lots of folks up there that think a nigger is as good as anybody else, and when you find such people set in their ways, it’s best not to argue matters with them, but lay low and let on you think that way too.  That’s the way those old Texas cowmen acted about it.

“Well, at this church fair there was to be voted a prize of a nice baby wagon, which had been donated by some merchant, to the prettiest baby under a year old.  Colonel Bob Zellers was in town at the time, stopping at a hotel where the darky cook was a man who had once worked for him on the trail.  ‘Frog,’ the darky, had married when he quit the colonel’s service, and at the time of this fair there was a pickaninny in his family about a year old, and nearly the color of a new saddle.  A few of these old cowmen got funny and thought it would be a good joke to have Frog enter his baby at the fair, and Colonel Bob being the leader in the movement, he had no trouble convincing the darky that that baby wagon was his, if he would only enter his youngster.  Frog thought the world of the old Colonel, and the latter assured him that he would vote for his baby while he had a dollar or a cow left.  The result was, Frog gave his enthusiastic consent, and the Colonel agreed to enter the pickaninny in the contest.