At Monument Station, I was surprised to see Mr. S. W. Williston get aboard with all his outfit. Williston did not know at first that I was on the train, and when he entered my car, he was greatly astonished, thinking that I was on his trail. He tried to find out my destination, but failed. We slept together at Denver. Then he took a train south, while I went north toward Cheyenne and the West.
Onward our train sped toward the land of the setting sun, through the grand and impressive scenery of the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas. At Sacramento I took the railroad for Redding, where, with seven other passengers, I entered a Concord coach drawn by a team of eight horses, and continued my journey by stage.
It was a lovely August evening. The moon was at its full, and the night was almost as bright as day. No sound broke the deep silence, except now and then the whoo of an owl as it called to its mate far away in the depth of the forest, or the plash of running water falling in cascades over the shelving rocks and dashing against the boulders.
Higher and higher we climbed, through primeval forests of spruce and fir, whose branches clove the sky a hundred feet above our heads. The rarefied air filled our lungs with its life-giving tonic, exhilarating us like wine. We knew that far above us rose Mount Shasta, the giant of the range, but for a time the heavy timber shut out the view, and we could see only the road ahead, winding up and up through the forests. Then suddenly, without warning, we moved above the timber-line, and Mount Shasta stood revealed in all its beauty, a perfect cone, towering four thousand feet into the air, its robes of everlasting snow glistening in the moonlight. Above, in the clear blue of the sky, the stars sparkled like jewels in an immortal canopy.
It was the first time that any of us had looked upon that majestic scene, and whatever may have been the differences of temperament among us, we were one in the feeling of awe which the glorious picture inspired. It laid a spell upon us; we were dumb before the invisible presence of the Power that had reared this stupendous pinnacle, and involuntarily our thoughts turned to that “city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”
Then to break the awful silence, and give some vent to our emotions, we broke out into the old song, “’Way down upon the Suwanee River”; and so we journeyed on for many hours, never out of sight of that majestic form.
At Ashland I was obliged to wait for a driver with a buckboard and a team of ponies to take me to Fort Klamath, Oregon. I was at that time a great lover of the gentle art of fishing, and early in the morning, before it was fully light, I was astir among the great live-oaks that grace the town. Walking through the sleeping village, I ran across the footprints of a large grizzly bear in the dust of the road, and followed them through the vacant streets. Wherever a gate had been left open, the bear had entered the yard, walked around the house, and come out at the gate again. I hoped to get a glimpse of him, but was disappointed, as the tracks led into the gloom of the forest. So I went fishing, and caught some speckled beauties for breakfast.
That evening I was driven over to Fort Klamath, where I was kindly invited to take possession of the commanding officer’s quarters and make myself at home; an invitation which I proceeded to accept at once.
Learning that a sheep-owner a few miles away had killed a grizzly, I went out to his camp to see it. Sure enough, there lay the mighty carcass, encircled with four inches of grease, enough for the polls of all the boys in Oregon. It seemed that as the time for his winter nap was approaching, Mr. Bruin had been laying in a supply of fuel by devouring the fat wethers of our friend’s flock. The latter had built a heavy brush fence around the sheep, and with the help of a large number of hounds, had kept his range free from coyotes, but he had been helpless before the attacks of this big bear. When he watched on top of the brush fence, he was not molested, but no sooner did he seek the comfortable cot in his tent, than his slumbers were broken by the piteous bleat of some sheep, as it was carried off to the woods by the bear.
About ten days before I reached Klamath, he had been awakened in the middle of the night by a commotion in the flock, and rushing out in his shirt into the cool night air, had seen the bear only ten feet away, across a deep and narrow stream. Without thinking of the consequences to himself if he only wounded the creature, he opened fire with his Winchester, and the first shot broke the bear’s neck.
When I arrived, the skin had been removed, but the huge carcass, which must have weighed at least a ton, had been lying in the hot August sun ever since. The sheep-owner (I am sorry that I have forgotten his name, as I was under heavy obligations to him) promised me that after breakfast he would help me in the not very enviable task of removing the decaying flesh from the bones. But after one whiff from the windward side, he asked a pertinent question, was I fond of trout, and upon my answering yes, remarked that he knew of a creek where he could get some beauties, and immediately disappeared. I saw him no more that morning.
At the first thrust of my knife into the bear, the stench was so horrible that I grew deathly sick. I filled my pipe and tried to find relief in smoking, but even then the odor was overpowering, and I smoked and sickened through the livelong day, until I had cleaned the filthy flesh from the bones, and they had been tied up in gunny-sacks and hung in a tree to dry. Then into the creek I went and with soap and sand scrubbed and scoured my body; but the horrid smell still hung about me, and I could eat neither supper nor breakfast the next morning, although at dinner I managed to stow away a good square meal. But even now, after thirty years, if you say “bear” to me, I can smell that bear.
At Klamath I hired for my assistant a man named George Loosely. I also bought two saddle ponies and one to carry the pack; and with a government tent and other outfit and rations purchased at the commissary,—we had our flour baked into bread by the post baker,—we started for Silver Lake, although no one at the post could give us any directions. I had a department map, sent to me by Professor Cope, which recorded, mistakenly as we found later, that Sprague River rose in Silver Lake. The government road to the east crossed the Williamson River on a government bridge, and came to an abrupt end in an Indian village on the western bank of Sprague River. So we decided to take the road as far as we could and then follow up the river to its source in the lake.
When we reached the Williamson River, we found there the lodge of a Snake Indian, who appeared dressed in red paint and a breech-cloth, and demanded toll. But as American citizens we had paid taxes to help pay for that bridge; so we refused to pay toll for the use of our own property, and rode across in spite of the threats hurled at us.
We reached Sprague River that same evening, and went into camp a short distance from a large Indian town. The houses, built by government contractors of rough logs, consisted of a single room with a shake roof. The Indians had torn out the board floors, and instead of using the fireplaces and chimneys which the builders had erected for their convenience, they had cut holes in the roofs, and built their fires in the middle of the floor, sleeping around them at night as their fathers used to do in their lodges or Sibley tents.
George, who was more familiar with them than I was, learned that a chief lay dying in one of the houses, and after supper he left me and went to witness the death ceremonies. After stowing away the bread and coffee between our mattresses and covering them with blankets, and hiding the bacon at the bottom of the mess box with tin dishes piled on top of it so that I should hear the rattle if a thieving Indian attempted to get at it, I, being tired, dropped off to sleep.
About three o’clock in the morning, George appeared, having been shut up in the house with the dying chief all night. When the medicine man began his incantations, the doors and windows were closed, while the steaming Indians danced in a circle around the dying chief, forcing the unwilling George to take part in the ceremonies. All night long they moved around in their death dance to the music of their drums and the wild gesticulations of the medicine man, and when George finally got away, he was about exhausted. He was soon lost in sleep, and as I habitually lie on my sound ear, neither of us heard anything through the night. But the next morning, when George had put on the coffee to boil and went into the mess box for the bacon, it had disappeared. The dishes had been carefully replaced.
After a breakfast of bread and coffee, we were early in the saddle, taking a heavy trail that led north and skirted Sprague River. By the merest chance, we met a white man, the first we had seen since leaving the post, and we stopped to ask the way to Silver Lake. A number of Snake Indians were standing around at the time. The man told us to go north on the trail to a sheep camp in Sican Valley, where we would receive further directions, and thanking him, we rode confidently forward.
Just as the sun was sinking, we entered a splendid forest of fir and spruce, and soon found that our trail forked. The heavy, well-traveled branch turned a little west of north; the other, leading due north, had apparently not been used since last year, as it was covered with old leaves. We did not know what to do, as the man whom we had met in the morning had not mentioned this fork. While we were talking about it, we heard the jingling bells of a pack horse or Indian cayuse, and soon a boy hove in sight, driving a couple of pack ponies. Moving to one side to let him pass, I asked him where he was going.
“To Sican Valley, to a sheep ranch,” he answered, and immediately was lost to sight among the giant trees. We meekly fell in behind and hurried after him.
Suddenly we came out into a natural park, the end of our trail. Five Indian lodges stood about in the open space, and five valiant braves, in their usual attire of paint and breech-cloths, with the inevitable Winchester, stepped forward to inform us that “white man was lost in the woods,” and that they would show him the trail for two dollars.
“Where is that miserable papoose?” I demanded, but they only grinned and repeated, “We will show you the road for two dollars.”
It was my habit, in a crisis of this kind, to smoke, for I regret to say that I was for many years a lover of the soothing weed; so, drawing out of my saddlebag a pound of fragrant “Lone Jack,” I proceeded to fill my pipe and decide upon my further course. Instantly the Indians crowded around me, and dropping the butts of their guns to the ground, pulled out their tobacco pouches, and opening them wide, held them up to be filled, crying in chorus, “Me tobac! Me tobac!”
But the memory of the deceitful boy was still rankling in my mind. I told George to follow me with the pack horse, and deliberately lighting my pipe and filling my lungs with smoke to their utmost capacity, I blew a cloud of it into the faces of the expectant beggars. Then I drove my spurs into my pony’s flanks and started off in a mad race against time, as the long shadows warned me only too plainly that the daylight, our only guide now, would soon leave us. I did not look back, but George, who did, saw the Indians, in anger, level their rifles as they shouted to us to stop.
That race with darkness was an exciting one, but just before night overtook us, we reached the trail which we had left to follow the lying Indian boy. In our haste, our bread had been torn from its sack by the outstretched limb of a tree, and was lost. However, we were so thankful to have escaped paying toll to those filthy Snakes, that we cheerfully made our supper of coffee, and sought our blankets.
At the first streak of daylight, after another meal of coffee, we were in our saddles; and we traveled all day, until, just as the sun was setting, we heard the welcome bleat of sheep and saw the herders driving their flocks down the slopes of the neighboring hills to their corrals in Sican Valley. Following them, we soon spied the camp in the heavy timber and smelled the delicious savor of a pot of mutton that was boiling over the fire. And before long, seated at the rude table, we were enjoying to the uttermost the hospitality of the camp.
We had learned on the journey that Sprague River rises in the heart of the mountains, instead of in Silver Lake, and we had crossed the divide between it and the lake before reaching Sican Valley. The next morning our sheepmen directed us on our way; and that same evening we were skirting the lake’s lovely shores. Its wide expanse of water put me in mind of my boyhood days on Otsego Lake or the Glimmer-glass.
We soon reached the hospitable home of Mr. Duncan, the postmaster of Silver Lake. He had built a comfortable house of logs, with a large chimney at one end and an old-fashioned fireplace, around which, as the nights were cold, we gathered and talked until far into the night.
Mr. Duncan’s family consisted of his wife and daughter, a dear, good girl, who will forgive me, I am sure, if I tell a story at her expense. George and I were sent to bed in a lean-to, and as our bedroom was next to that of the Duncans and the stoppings had fallen out of some of the chinks in the wall between, we could hear everything that was said in their room. In the middle of the night I woke up and heard the old gentleman talking to his wife about their daughter.
“Mother,” he said, “I think John will be a good husband for Mary, don’t you?”
Before she could answer, Mary, who had a bed at the other end of the parents’ room, called out with great energy, “I think so too, father!”
In an instant all was still, while George and I, in our efforts to keep quiet, stuffed the bedclothes into our mouths until we were almost suffocated.
We unloaded our weary pack horse, and the next day brought our supplies, and loaded them into Mr. Duncan’s wagon. Then taking him with us for guide, we started on our long drive to the boneyard, fifty-six miles through the great sage-brush desert of eastern Oregon.
On we journeyed, through what seemed an interminable expanse of sage-brush, greasewood, and sand. The bunches of sage-brush topped conical mounds of sand, whose sides were scoured and polished by the winds that howled in and out through the labyrinth of hills, laden with drifting sand. If one could have gained an elevation above the level of these sandhills, and looked out over the landscape, one would have gazed upon a scene of even greater desolation than that afforded by the parched short-grass plains of western Kansas,—a dreary, monotonous waste of olive green, stretching away north, east, and south, as far as the eye could reach, and shut in on the west by the great ranges of the Sierras, whose flanks, dark below the timber line with heavy forests, were deeply scarred above with glistening white glaciers.
We followed the California road to Oregon, for in those days Oregon was practically an unknown territory, with the exception of the Willamette Valley. And I suppose that it is still so, for that moist, fertile valley differs as widely from the vast semi-desert east of the Cascade Range as the Santa Clara Valley from the cactus-covered sandhills of southern California.
At night, after a day’s journey through sand and sage-brush, we came to a ranch beside an alkaline lake in the very heart of the desert. Here, in a cabin built of logs from the neighboring mountains, lived the hermit of this region, a man named Lee Button. Had it not been that the road passed his door, he would have seen only a hunter now and then, out after the deer which abounded in the desert, or perhaps the cattlemen when in winter they turned their cattle loose in the desert to look out for themselves. On all the neighboring ranches, the cattle were turned into the desert for food and shelter in winter. Here, protected from storms, they fed upon the alkaline grass and sweet sage and upon the thick leaves which fell in handfuls from the greasewood bushes. These cattle had cut innumerable paths at every conceivable angle, and one unaccustomed to the country might easily become confused and lose himself in the labyrinth of trails. There was horror in the thought of being lost in that solitude.
Mr. Duncan put up his horses in the barn of the ranch, which was well stocked with hay and oats, and we picketed our ponies on a flat covered with alkaline grass on the borders of the lake. Then from under a certain post which he knew of, Mr. Duncan dug up a tin can containing the key of the cabin. Past experience had taught Mr. Button caution. He had gone to California once, after a herd of horses, leaving his door unlocked, and some prowling immigrant had abused his hospitality and robbed his cabin of its store of food and blankets. So now, when he left home, he locked the door and hid the key, giving, however, the secret of its hiding-place to his neighbor, Mr. Duncan.
His cooking utensils, consisting of a camp kettle, a frying pan, a Dutch oven, and a coffee pot, were brought out and cleaned, and the larder searched for food. It was the custom of the country at that day to consider food and shelter free to all. I was offered the next year a house, blankets, flour, and bacon, as much as I could use for nothing, if I wanted to spend the winter on a ranch in eastern Oregon. I was only expected to cut my own wood and cook my own food.
Soon a cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, and the burning sage-brush was filling the air with that indescribable odor from which one is never free while in the desert. We had traveled through great droves of wild geese along the lake, and as they were so tame that they simply stepped out of our way like barnyard geese, we did not think it worth while to waste ammunition on them. So I set three traps, common steel traps such as are used for catching coons, and strewed oats around them. The next morning I found a brant in one, a magpie in another, and the house cat in the third. We let the cat and the magpie go, and breakfasted on the brant. Our usual fare was bacon, bread, and coffee, and sometimes dried apples. I worked for years in Oregon with no other food, except an occasional deer or mountain sheep.
The next day, trusting entirely to Mr. Duncan’s guidance, we pushed on without a trail, winding in and out among the hillocks with no landmarks but the mountains in the west. At sunset, we came out into the open on the shore of a small alkaline lake. “Fossil Lake,” I named it at once, and it goes by that name to this day. This pond, as we should call it in old New York, covered only a few acres then, and is now entirely dried up.
“There,” shouted Mr. Duncan, as he pointed with his whip to the lake shore, “there is the boneyard.”
I instantly requested him to help George get supper and pitch the tent, and seizing my collecting bag, rushed down to the shore. The clay bottom of the ancient lake had been dried out, and now formed the shore of the remaining water. This old lake bed had once extended over a much larger area, but it had been partially buried beneath large piles of drifting sand. Scattered through the loose sand and on the clay bed were great numbers of the bones and teeth of reptiles, birds, and mammals, indiscriminately mingled. I had come upon a boneyard indeed.
I was down on the sand at once, picking up bones and teeth and putting them in piles. No two bones seemed to belong together, and the skulls and arches had been crushed beneath the feet of animals, probably cattle and deer, which had come down to drink at the lake. What pleased me, however, was the fact that scattered among these remains of an earlier day, were arrow-heads and spear-points of polished obsidian, or volcanic glass. I was too much excited then to notice that I did not find a single bone or tooth in its original position in the clay matrix, but that all were loose, detached, and scattered, and that the implements were lying about in the same way.
As Mr. Duncan was to return to the post-office at Silver Lake the next morning, I gathered a cigar-boxful of loose teeth, arrow-heads, and spear-points, and packed them to send off to Professor Cope. And that night, by a sage-brush fire, I wrote the letter which he saw fit to publish in the American Naturalist, a magazine of which he was the editor, under a title of his own, “Pliocene Man,” and signed “E. D. Cope.”
For weeks I sifted through my fingers the fine sand of that lake shore, picking out bone after bone. The only specimen which I found undisturbed in the clay matrix was part of the skull of a hairy mammoth, or Elephas primigenius.
Dr. Shufeldt is the author of a valuable memoir on the fossil birds of this region,—“The Fossil Avi-Fauna of the Equus Beds of the Oregon Desert,” published by the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences. He worked over the collection made by the late Professor Condon of the Oregon State University, the collection which Professor Cope made a few years after mine, and mine.
In these three collections, he finds five species of grebes, and nine of gulls, of which two species are new to science, Professor Condon being the discoverer of one, while I found the other. Of cormorants, there are two species, one discovered by Cope. One species, quite common among the fossil remains, is now extinct. There is a new swan also, described by Professor Cope, who writes of it: “This swan was discovered by ex-Governor Whitaker of Oregon [who discovered the Fossil Lake locality] in the Pliocene formations of the state. The same bird was afterwards procured by my assistant, Charles H. Sternberg.” Altogether there are nineteen species of Anseres, i. e., geese, ducks, swans, etc., of which two are new.
One of my discoveries was a flamingo, which was dedicated to Professor Cope under the title Phœnicopterus copei. Dr. Shufeldt says: “It is a fact of no little interest that a flamingo inhabited the lakes of the Silver Lake region of Oregon during the Pliocene Epoch.” The collections include a heron and a couple of coots also. Among the fowl are four grouse, discovered by Cope, and an entirely new genus and species which I had the honor of finding. Of eagles, there are two species. There are also a great horned owl, a blackbird, and a raven.
Among the other fossil remains taken from this region are six genera of fish, a majority of them new, and fifteen species of fossil mammalia, including two llamas, three horses, an elephant, a dog, an otter, a beaver, a mouse, a great sloth, Mylodon, as large as a grizzly bear, and other forms.
“Thomas Condon,” writes Dr. Shufeldt in his memoir, “was the first scientific man to visit the Fossil Lake region, with the results already stated. Cope and his assistant Charles Sternberg came later, and gathered many hundred bones and bone fragments.” And in the preface to his “Tertiary Vertebrata,” Vol. III, page xxvii, Professor Cope writes: “The Tertiary formations explored in 1878 were the John Day, Loup Fork, and Equus beds. These were examined by Charles H. Sternberg both in Washington and Oregon; in the former near to Fort Walla Walla, and in the latter, in the desert east of the Sierra Nevada. The basin of an ancient lake, originally discovered by Governor Whitaker of Oregon, was found strewn with the bones of llamas, elephants, horses, sloths, and smaller animals, with birds, and all were collected by Mr. Sternberg and safely forwarded to Philadelphia. I examined this locality myself in 1879 and obtained further remains of extinct and recent species of mammalia found mingled with numerous worked flints.”
The reader will notice that Cope puts my expedition in ’78 instead of ’77 and that Dr. Shufeldt gives Cope’s visit to Fossil Lake as before mine, when, in reality, it was two years later.
On p. 420 of his memoir, Dr. Shufeldt writes: “We must believe that it still remains problematical whether man was there, and further comparative search is demanded to decide whence came, and at what time, those stone implements of human manufacture, commingled as they are with the bones of the animals, many of which are long since extinct.” And Professor Cope says on the same subject: “Scattered everywhere in the deposit were obsidian implements of human manufacture. Some of these were of inferior workmanship, and many of them covered with a patin of no great thickness, which completely replaced the luster of the surface. Other specimens were bright as when first made. The abundance of these flints was remarkable, and suggested that they may have been shot at the game, both winged and otherwise, that in former times frequented the lake.”
After I had written the letter already mentioned, having carefully gone over all the ground in the vicinity of Fossil Lake, and longing for new worlds to conquer, I started out one day on my pony through the desert, hoping to find another locality in which the wind had uncovered a fossil bed. I spent the greater part of the day in fruitless search, and was about to return home when I was attracted by the top of a dead spruce tree sticking out of a sandhill. The rest of the tree had been completely buried by the sand.
My curiosity was aroused, and I climbed to the top of the hill to examine the spruce. When I reached the top, however, I found myself looking down into a pleasant little valley, which had been scooped out by the wind, and, descending, I discovered that I had stumbled upon the former site of an Indian village. Places near where the lodges had stood were marked by piles of the bleached bones of existing species of antelope, deer, rabbits, etc. None of these bones were petrified like those at Fossil Lake.
Near the site of each lodge stood a large mortar, made of volcanic rock, with a pestle lying in it. They had probably been used by the squaws for grinding up acorns and other materials for bread-making. Doubtless a storm of sand had forced the villagers to flee for their lives without giving them time to save even these valuable mortars.
I found a spring of cold water which had built up a mound of white sand, and from the side of a sandhill I pulled out the back part of a human skull. I could not tell how large the village had been, as it extended into the sandhill.
I soon found where the ancient arrow-maker had had his shop by the great quantities of cast-off obsidian chips that covered the ground, as well as by the broken and perfect arrow-heads and spear-points, beautifully polished and finished, and the knives, drills, and the like that lay about. I did not find a vestige of anything made of iron.
Having secured a number of the obsidian points, which I afterwards sent to Cope, I started for camp; but I had delayed too long, and night overtook me before I reached home. My pony and I came near being lost in the desert. I gave him the lines, but I was much worried at not seeing the welcome glow of the camp fire, when I had thought that I must be near my tent. Finally I shouted, and at last heard a faint answer. But even then, owing to my deaf ear, I could not locate the camp, and had to wait until George came up and piloted me in.
Now without doubt the arrow-heads and spear-points mingled with the bones at Fossil Lake are of the same manufacture as those which I found at this Indian village, although the latter are not so much weathered, having evidently been recently covered with sand. I conclude, therefore, that the implements mingled with the bones are no older than the village, perhaps a hundred years old. They were probably shot by the Indians of the village at the wild animals which doubtless came in great numbers to the lake to drink. Then some powerful wind, like that which covered the village, drifted away the sand that lay over the fossil bones, and the flints, being too heavy to be carried away with the sand, dropped down and mingled with the bones. This seems to me the only possible explanation. And I am glad to say that so high an authority as Professor J. C. Merriam of the University of California, after the most careful study and explorations, agrees with me in this. He has recently been over the Fossil Lake region, and he assures me that it is a mistake to suppose that the human implements found there were contemporary with the extinct animals of the Equus Beds.
Whenever George and I had collected a load of fossils, we took them in to Button’s ranch. One day we were late in starting, and realized that we should have to hurry to reach the ranch before dark. As so often happens, this was the very occasion upon which we were fated to be delayed.
At a certain place on our route, we had to pass some mud springs, circular wells filled to the brim with thick, yellowish mud of the consistency of mortar. In wet weather they continually boiled up without overflowing, but to-day they were covered with a hard coating of dry mud, cracked deeply in all directions.
I called to George, who was driving the pack horse, to watch him and see that he did not jump into the spring that we were just passing; but the words were hardly out of my mouth when the miserable wretch made a running jump, and landing in the middle of the crust, broke through and went down into the thick, nasty mud. As he was going down, he seemed to realize what he had done, and managed to get his front feet over the rim of solid earth. And there he hung, the broad pack—we had brought along our tent and blankets—helping to buoy him up.
We sprang from our horses, and made a rush to save our precious fossils, beside which everything else, including the mischievous pony, was of no account. We had to cut the ropes that bound the fossils and camp outfit to the animal, and when we had them safe on solid ground, tie a rope around his neck and pull him out. Of course he was thoroughly frightened, and did everything in his power to help us. Such a looking horse you never saw as he was when we got him out. His whole body was covered with a coat of sticky, yellow mud, which we could not scrape off. We had to take him into a creek and give him such a scrubbing as, I think, no member of the genus Equus ever had before or since.
All this took time, and it was late at night before we reached the ranch. It was our habit, when we got to the cabin and felt that it would be too much trouble to open our pack and get out our own supplies, to help ourselves from Mr. Button’s store. So, after we had put the horses in the barn and given them a liberal feed of oats and plenty of hay, we went into the larder to get something for our own supper, for by that time we were pretty hungry.
After supper I lay down on the absent lord’s blankets, and was smoking the pipe of peace, when a knock was heard at the door. It surprised me, as it was the custom of the country to walk in without the formality of knocking. I shouted, “Come in!” and a short, heavy-set man entered. He said that he had been overtaken by night, and as both he and his team were in need of food, rest, and shelter, he wanted to know whether we would take him in.
“Why, certainly,” I answered. I have noticed that most men are liberal with other men’s property. “I don’t own the ranch, but we have just put our horses in the barn, where there is plenty of hay and oats, and there is plenty of food here. George will show you the way to the barn and help you unhitch, and I will have supper ready when you return.”
He thanked me, and while they were putting up the team, I got a hot supper with materials from Mr. Button’s larder. This meal was greatly relished by our midnight guest.
I returned to the bed and my pipe, and was entering into a lively conversation with the stranger, when the thought suddenly flashed into my head, What if this man owns the ranch? I sprang from the bed on the instant, and fired pointblank the question, “Do you know Lee Button?”
“Yes, I’ve seen him,” was the answer.
“That’s your name, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes,” said the stranger, and I felt so cheap that I would have sold out for nothing. But this was Mr. Button’s chance to show what sort of a man he was, and when I apologized for the freedom with which we had made ourselves at home in his house and used his goods, he told me that we had done exactly right, and that he would have felt hurt if we had acted otherwise.
He became a true friend and helper, and his log cabin proved a valuable place of shelter for my party during some of the cold October nights. If these lines should ever reach his eyes, they carry to him my cordial thanks for his hospitality.