night, and it was pitch dark before we made camp.  I explained the situation to the men.  We planned to go in empty in five days, which would give us seven to come back loaded.  We made every camp on time like clockwork.  The fifth morning we were anxious to get a daybreak start, so we could load at night.  The night herder had his orders to bring in the oxen the first sign of day, and I called the cook an hour before light.  When the oxen were brought in, the men were up and ready to go to yoking.  But the nigh wheeler in Joe Jenk’s team, a big brindle, muley ox, a regular pet steer, was missing.  I saw him myself, Joe saw him, and the night herder swore he came in with the rest.  Well, we looked high and low for that Mr. Ox, but he had vanished.  While the men were eating their breakfast, I got on my horse and the night herder and I scoured and circled that country for miles around, but no ox.  The country was so bare and level that a jack rabbit needed to carry a fly for shade.  I was worried, for we needed every ox and every moment of time.  I ordered Joe to tie his mate behind the trail wagon and pull out one ox shy.

“Well, fellows, that thing worried me powerful.  Half the teamsters, good, honest, truthful men as ever popped a whip, swore they saw that ox when they came in.  Well, it served a strong argument that a man can be positive and yet be mistaken.  We nooned ten miles from our night camp that day.  Jerry Wilkens happened to mention it at dinner that he believed his trail needed greasing.  ‘Why,’ said Jerry, ’you’d think that I was loaded, the way my team kept their chains taut.’  I noticed Joe get up from dinner before he had finished, as if an idea had struck him.  He went over and opened the sheet in Jerry’s trail wagon, and a smile spread over his countenance.  ‘Come here, fellows,’ was all he said.

“We ran over to the wagon and there”—­

The boys turned their backs with indistinct mutterings of disgust.

“You all don’t need to believe this if you don’t want to, but there was the missing ox, coiled up and sleeping like a bear in the wagon.  He even had Jerry’s roll of bedding for a pillow.  You see, the wagon sheet was open in front, and he had hopped up on the trail tongue and crept in there to steal a ride.  Joe climbed into the wagon, and gave him a few swift kicks in the short ribs, when he opened his eyes, yawned, got up, and jumped out.”

Bull was rolling a cigarette before starting, while Fox’s night horse was hard to bridle, which hindered them.  With this slight delay, Forrest turned his horse back and continued:  “That same ox on the next trip, one night when we had the wagons parked into a corral, got away from the herder, tip-toed over the men’s beds in the gate, stood on his hind legs long enough to eat four fifty-pound sacks of flour out of the rear end of a wagon, got down on his side, and wormed his way under the wagon back into the herd, without being detected or waking a man.”