It was a whole week before I could sit on a horse, let alone walk or run. On the same day I staggered out of the wagon with a patched and purple face, I saw a huge grotesque at the same moment reel out of another wagon on the opposite side of the caravan - for they had not yet broken up their morning circle for the day’s trek. I did not recognize, at first, the awful face I saw. Then I knew that it was none other than big Chuck Morris.
The men were finishing the cooking of breakfast at the central fire, and yet even breakfast stopped to watch the encounter between Chuck and myself. We went straight toward one another to the center of the circle, and there we paused and looked at one another out of our blackened eyes. I still hated him, but the change from the handsome face was so great that I could not help breaking into laughter.
“Chuck,” I said, “you’re a sight.”
He roared with laughter at the same moment. “Lew,” he said, “you little game chicken… you’re a sight, too.”
He clapped me by the shoulder. I caught him by the hand. In that instant was cemented a friendship which was to last through many years, a strange and beautiful friendship. Would to heaven that it had never been broken, Morris, and that you and I had never come to hate one another as we do now.
The men, when they saw that there was to be no more righting, gave us a shout and a cheer and called us over to the breakfast fire. We sat down there side by side. I’ll never forget how the men laughed at our smashed and purple faces. I’ll never forget how the youngsters did their best to swallow their grins for fear of us. But we would not have cared if the whole world had laughed, we were each so happy to have found a friend worthy of the other. So perfect was our friendship that we even talked of the cause of the fight and of the fight itself.
“You see,” I said to Chuck, “we’re from different sides of the fence. You know what grows in your own back yard. I know what grows in mine. Things look different when you have only a knothole to peek through. But let that go. You can think what you want, Chuck, and I can think what I want. Leastways, there’s no slaves out here to quarrel about.”
He chuckled and nodded over that.
“If you’d had ten pounds’ more weight, or another year of seasoning behind you, you’d have licked me, Lew,” he commented so frankly I turned red at the mere thought of it. “Every time I closed with you, it was like closing with a wildcat. I had those knuckles of yours slashing me across the face. Besides, I was down and done for with the first punch… if the boys hadn’t given me a hand.”
This sort of talk made me dizzy with wonder. I had such a shame of defeat that merely to mention it made me a little sick. But he was so open and free I felt like a small-souled coward. That was a characteristic of Chuck’s. He was always willing to admit when he was beaten. Yet, there is a sort of savage bulldog in me that shames me from seeing such truths. After that, we rolled our blankets down beside one another every night of the passage.
There is no voyage at sea that takes as long as the crossing of the plains did with a traders’ outfit. Even with steers, in the earlier days, the outfits of the ‘Forty-Niners bound for California traveled faster, because they had a definite destination, and every day they tried to put more miles behind them and press farther toward their goal. But the trader had no such goal. He was simply embarked for the prairies and for Indians in general. He never knew exactly where he could find them, and, when he found them, he never knew whether they would feel more like trading or taking scalps - and the whole train of goods.
That was why we traveled in such a large band. We had, altogether, fifty-five men in that troop, and every man was familiar with the use of a rifle. Every night, or whenever the scouts brought back word of danger, the wagons were drawn into a compact circle, and the bales of forage were piled against the wagons, making a very good sort of fort. At night the horses were tethered inside, close to the wagons. If there were trouble, they were taken to the center of the corral, and their heads were pointed in, because what a horse doesn’t see is not so apt to bother it. Those fifty-five rifles handled by steady fighters could turn back the rush of any wandering bands of young Indians, hunting for game and scalps and fun. If there were a gathered tribe, there was also apt to be more good sense from the old men among the Indians - wise old chaps who pointed out that wars with the white men rarely ended well, and that one massacre, no matter on how small a scale, was enough to start trouble.
For trading we had quantities of butcher knives, et cetera, and mostly made of cheapest steel. We had hundreds of pounds of beads, all of the biggest size and of the brightest colors. We had flashy cloths, usually cotton printed with staring dyes. We had some old rifles and pistols, usually guaranteed to explode after two or three discharges. We had a hundred kinds of foolish trinkets, to say nothing of extra flour and molasses and tea - for the Indians had the strangest love of the white man’s food. But, first and last, we had firewater. Not whiskey. Make no mistake about that. The thing that ruined the Indians was not whiskey, no matter how new, how poorly made, how raw. It was alcohol - raw grain alcohol of the cheapest sort, full of impurities. It was mixed with water and with coloring matter of any kind, often sweetened a little with molasses. The effect of it was simply a terrible thing to watch. A tumbler of it could actually make a white man drunk - and I have never seen a white man who could not endure alcohol better than the poor Indians with their hair-trigger nerves and lack of centuries of drunkenness. It was a dastardly thing to trade among the Indians with such poison. But the traders who did not carry it could do no business, and money, from the beginning of time, has always weighed heavier than ethics. I did not understand, then, what the whiskey accomplished in the natures of the red men. But after I learned, I am honestly glad to say that I never used whiskey to delude any Indian - not even a Cheyenne, confound their rascally, horse-stealing hearts.
All the ways of the prairie men were made short-handed for me by Chuck Morris, and I could not have found a better teacher. He had been born to this life, and, having been in it from infancy, he knew more by instinct than most of the oldest scouts ever learned through experience. In the first place, he gave me a horse. Chris Hudson had offered to sell me one of the worst of his string. Not because he was ungenerous, but because giving things away was not in his nature. He had surrendered the Colt to me out of purest chagrin when he saw how much more master of it I was than he could ever hope to be. But Chuck Morris showed me his string. He had four horses, and all of them were fine animals. They were of fine Kentucky blood crossed with the best sort of Indian mares. The result was that they were larger than almost any Indian pony, and they had borrowed some of the toughness of their mothers. One meets hard weather on the prairies, and your real Thoroughbred is apt to be made of tender stuff. When Chuck showed me those four beauties, he pointed out a gray mare.