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149
were out of that range. After we got up into Kansas I saw two men riding around the herd with Baylor and when he left them he came to me and said, "Bud, those men are butchers, and said they would give us $300.00 for those range cattle and do not want a bill of sale." I said, "Tell them the cattle are not ours, so we can't do that ; we will turn them over to Colonel Ellison and he can find the owner," and we took them on. We delivered that herd at Ogallala, Nebraska, took another from there to the Bell Fourche in Wyoming —a 60-mile drive without water for the cattle. We were just twelve miles from the buffalo. By the time we branded out the herd we were short of grub, so did not go buffalo hunting, and right there I lost my only chance to kill buffalo. We were five hundred miles from a railroad, but I wish I had gone anyway.
Tom P. Baylor was a son of General John R. Baylor. He died some twenty-one years ago. He was as fine a man as I ever knew. Ham P. Bee is now in San Antonio, express messenger on a railroad.
In 1883 I went on the trail with W. T. Jackman of San Marcos. We started the herd from Colorado County at "Ranches Grande," owned by Stafford Brothers. While in the Indian Territory one evening two Indians ate supper with us. I was holding the herd while first relief was at supper. Dan, a fifteen-year-old boy, was holding the "remuda " (saddle horses). We really had two herds with one wagon, had three thousand cattle, four hundred horses and one hundred saddle horses, fifteen men in all, and only three six-shooters in the outfit. Just as I went to eat my supper and the horse herders were going to relieve Dan, we heard him give a distress yell and shoot several times. Jackman and Lee Wolfington mounted their horses, drew their guns and started in a run for Dan. That was one time I wished for a gun. Twelve men and nothing to defend ourselves with. So you know I was like the little negro, "Not scared, just a