I kept thinking of my short but adventurous past.  And as soon as another opportunity offered to return to it I seized it eagerly.

That spring my former boss, Lew Simpson, was busily organizing a “lightning bull team” for his employers, Russell, Majors & Waddell.  Albert Sidney Johnston’s soldiers, then moving West, needed supplies, and needed them in a hurry.  Thus far the mule was the reindeer of draft animals, and mule trains were forming to hurry the needful supplies to the soldiers.

But Simpson had great faith in the bull.  A picked bull train, he allowed, could beat a mule train all hollow on a long haul.  All he wanted was a chance to prove it.

His employers gave him the chance.  For several weeks he had been picking his animals for the outfit.  And now he was to begin what is perhaps the most remarkable race ever made across the Plains.

A mule train was to start a week after Simpson’s lightning bulls began their westward course.  Whichever outfit got to Fort Laramie first would be the winner.  No more excitement could have been occasioned had the contestants been a reindeer and a jack-rabbit.  To my infinite delight Simpson let me join his party.

My thousand-mile tramp over the Plains had cured me of the walking habit and I was glad to find that this time I was to have a horse to ride—­part of the way, anyhow.  I was to be an extra hand—­which meant that by turns I was to be a bull-whacker, driver and general-utility man.

I remember that our start was a big event.  Men, women and children watched our chosen animals amble out of Salt Creek.  The “mule skinners,” busy with preparations for their own departure, stopped work to jeer us.

“We’ll ketch you in a couple of days or so!” yelled Tom Stewart, boss of the mule outfit.

But Simpson only grinned.  Jeers couldn’t shake his confidence either in himself or his long-horned motive power.

We made the first hundred and fifty miles easily.  I was glad to be a plainsman once more, and took a lively interest in everything that went forward.  We were really making speed, too, which added to the excitement.  The ordinary bull team could do about fifteen miles a day.  Under Simpson’s command his specially selected bulls were doing twenty-five, and doing it right along.

But one day, while we were nooning about one hundred and fifty miles on the way, one of the boys shouted:  “Here come the mules!”

Presently Stewart’s train came shambling up, and a joyful lot the “mule skinners” were at what they believed their victory.

But it was a short-lived victory.  At the end of the next three hundred miles we found them, trying to cross the Platte, and making heavy work of it.  The grass fodder had told on the mules.  Supplies from other sources were now exhausted.  There were no farms, no traders, no grain to be had.  The race had become a race of endurance, and the strongest stomachs were destined to be the winners.