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Our camps at night were hidden, meals hastily prepared, and the fires kept to
coals or to nothing at all. Judas proved an excellent camp cook, which
pleased
me. I could cook but didn't favor it much, and Orrin was no better than me.
As
for the Tinker, he kept silent on the subject.
We were coming up to the site of old Fort Cobb when Orrin, who was riding
point,
suddenly pulled up. A horse nickered, and then a dozen Indians rode over the
crest of the hill.
Sighting us they pulled up sharp, but I held my hand up, palm out, as a
signal
we were peaceful, and they rode up. They were Cheyennes, and they had been
hunting along Cache Creek. By the look of things they had been successful,
for
they were loaded down with meat.
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They warned us of a war party of Kiowas over west and south and swapped some
meat with us for some sugar. We sat our horses and watched them go, and I
suggested we swing north.
For the next few days we switched directions four or five times, riding north
to
Pond Creek, following it for a day or so, then a little south to confuse
anybody
following us, and finally north toward the Antelope Hills and the Texas
Panhandle.
This was open grass country with a few trees along the water courses, but
little
enough timber even there. We picked up fuel where we could find it during the
day, and at night gathered buffalo chips. We were heading into empty country
where there would be almost no water.
We came suddenly upon a group of some twenty horses, all unshod, traveling
northwest by north. I pulled rein.
"Indians," I said.
The Tinker glanced at me. "Might they not be wild horses?"
"Uh-uh. If they were wild horses, you'd find a pile of dung, but you see it's
scattered along and that means the Indians kept their horses in motion.
"The tracks are two days old," I added, "and were made early in the morning."
The Tinker was amused, but curious, too. "How do you figure that?"
"Look," I said, "there's sand stuck to those blades of grass that were packed
down by the horses' hooves over there, too. See? There hasn't been any dew
for
the past two mornings, but three days ago there was a heavy dew. That's when
they passed by here."
"Then we don't have to worry," he suggested.
I chuckled. "Suppose we meet them coming back?"
We rode on, holding to shallow ground when we could find it. We were now
coming
into an area that undoubtedly has some of the flattest land on earth land cut
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by
several major canyons. However, those canyons were, I believed, much to the
south of us.
I was pretty sure we were following much the same route pa would have taken
in
coming west. We'd switched around here and there, but nonetheless I believed
our
general route to be the one he would have followed twenty years before.
Their needs for water and fuel would have been the same as ours, and their
fears
of Indians even greater since this had been entirely Indian country in their
time. The times when I'd traveled wilderness country with pa had been few,
mostly in the mountains, when I was a very young boy. Yet I knew how his
thinking went, for he had given us much of our early education, either by the
fireside or out in the hills. He was a thinking man, and he had little enough
to
leave us aside from the almost uncanny knowledge of wilderness living that he
had picked up over the years.
No man likes to think of all he has learned going up like the smoke of a
fire,
to be lost in the vastness of sky and cloud. Pa wanted to share it with us,
to
give us what he learned, and I listened well, them days, and I learned a
sight
more than I guessed.
So when we saw that knoll with the flat rocks atop it and the creek with
trees
growing along it, I said to Orrin, "About there, Orrin. I'd say about there."
"I'll bet," he agreed.
"What is it?" Judas inquired.
"That's the sort of place pa would camp, an' if I ain't mistaken, that
there's
McClellan Creek."
CHAPTER X
We spurred our horses and loped on up to the edge of a valley maybe a mile
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wide.
There were large cottonwoods along the banks of a mighty pretty stream that
was
about twenty feet wide but no more than six inches deep.
The water was clear and pure, coming down from the Staked Plain that loomed
above and to the west of us. None of us relished that ride, but we had it to
do.
"Marcy named this stream after McClellan," Orrin said. "He believed McClellan
was the first white man to see it. Marcy was exploring the headwaters of the
Red
and the Canadian rivers on that trip."
"We'll camp," I said.
We scouted the stream for the best location for a camp and found it at a
place
where a huge old cottonwood had toppled to the ground. The upper branches and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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