XIII.
Captain Chiles’ Chase.
When Reece had got to the top of the mound he saw Captain Chiles, sitting on a horse, holding by a rope a huge bull elk. The elk stood in the bottom of a deep, narrow ditch, ten feet deep, with banks almost perpendicular, so steep that he was unable to get up them or out of the ditch to assail his captor. Captain Chiles, when he first caught up with the band of elk, had made an effort to kill one with the pistols, but for some reason he could only get the pistols to fire two of the charges, and with these two he only wounded a cow slightly, not enough to stop her from running. He kept after the band, all the while trying to get the revolver to fire, trying every chamber, but with no success. After he had kept up the chase for two or three miles the large bull elk, being very fat, got too tired to keep up with the band, but trotted along behind, in fact, so far exhausted that Chiles could keep up with him with his horse in a trot. The captain despaired of being able to stop one with the pistols, and, finding a small lariat I had brought from the Kiowas as we went out, on my saddle, used for picketing my horse, resolved to try the plan of lassoing the big fellow.
Being an expert in rope throwing, he had little difficulty in preparing the noose or getting a fastening around the top prong of one branch of the elk’s great antlers. As soon as the elk found he was restrained by the rope he turned about and charged on Captain Chiles with all the power and fury he could command, and twice or thrice the captain was forced to cut loose from him in order to escape his assaults. The rope was long enough to drag on the ground some distance behind him, so that the captain could recover hold of it without dismounting, reaching down and picking it up as the bull trotted away from him. He kept on after him for some distance, occasionally jerking him back, and worrying him until he could hardly walk. Coming to the lower end of the ditch, washed out to a depth of ten feet, at a point a few yards above, he managed to guide the animal, bewildered as he was by the heat, together with the violent and prolonged exercise, into it, leading or driving him along up the ditch until he got him in between the high banks of it to a place where the animal could not get at him however anxious he was to do so.
When Reece arrived, as above related, he found Chiles sitting there on the horse holding the end of the rope, but having nothing with which to kill the animal, not even a pocket pistol. Reece had with him a belt revolver, and, under the directions of Chiles, he carefully crawled to the edge of the ditch to within a few feet of the elk’s head and killed him with a couple of shots in the forehead.
The bull had not been wounded by Chiles, and no one but a veritable daredevil as he was would have undertaken the job of lassoing an elk under such circumstances as he did. But Chiles was a stranger to fear.
Chiles, Reece and I got to the camp about 2 o’clock, near six miles from where the elk was killed. After dinner we went out with pack mules and the necessary hatchets and butcher knives, and two of the drivers, to butcher the elk. The animal was a splendid specimen of his kind, supporting a magnificent pair of antlers, fully hardened and developed, and was fatter than any other animal of the deer kind I have seen, before or since. We butchered and brought to camp on the pack mules every part of his carcass, including the antlers. The latter were brought home to Jackson county. We feasted on the flesh of the fat elk for several days, and my recollection is that I never tasted better meat.
The remaining part of the journey was uneventful, the entire party remaining with the train until we were within eighty miles of the state line of Missouri. Then, in company with Captain Chiles, I started, before daylight, to make a forced march to Westport. We rode forty miles before we halted for breakfast, obtaining it at a settler’s cabin in the vicinity of Black Jack, arriving in Westport late in the evening, in the latter part of September, feeling very willing to rest once more in a comfortable house and bed.
I saw my friend Reece about a year after he had returned to his home in Missouri still making a fight for life, but during the second year he struck his flag and made a final surrender.
At Westport the drivers were paid off and disbanded, but I was not present to witness the separation of the company that had formed a companionship, offensive and defensive, during this long and tiresome journey across the plains. Doubtless nearly all of them, in the vernacular of the Western mountains, have “crossed over the range.”