An amusing situation developed during the summer of 1881 at Dodge.  The Texas drovers formed a social club and rented and furnished quarters, which immediately became the rendezvous of the wayfaring mavericks.  Cigars and refreshments were added, social games introduced, and in burlesque of the general craze of organizing stock companies to engage in cattle ranching, our club adopted the name of The Juan-Jinglero Cattle Company, Limited.  The capital stock was placed at five million, full-paid and non-assessable, with John T. Lytle as treasurer, E.G.  Head as secretary, Jess Pressnall as attorney, Captain E.G.  Millet as fiscal agent for placing the stock, and a dozen leading drovers as vice-presidents, while the presidency fell to me.  We used the best of printed stationery, and all the papers of Kansas City and Omaha innocently took it up and gave the new cattle company the widest publicity.  The promoters of the club intended it as a joke, but the prominence of its officers fooled the outside public, and applications began to pour in to secure stock in the new company.  No explanation was offered, but all applications were courteously refused, on the ground that the capital was already over-subscribed.  All members were freely using the club stationery, thus daily advertising us far and wide, while no end of jokes were indulged in at the expense of the burlesque company.  For instance, Major Seth Mabry left word at the club to forward his mail to Kansas City, care of Armour’s Bank, as he expected to be away from Dodge for a week.  No sooner had he gone than every member of the club wrote him a letter, in care of that popular bank, addressing him as first vice-president and director of The Juan-Jinglero Cattle Company.  While attending to business Major Mabry was hourly honored by bankers and intimate friends desiring to secure stock in the company, to all of whom he turned a deaf ear, but kept the secret.  “I told the boys,” said Major Seth on his return, “that our company was a close corporation, and unless we increased the capital stock, there was no hope of them getting in on the ground floor.”

In Dodge practical joking was carried to the extreme, both by citizens and cowmen.  One night a tipsy foreman, who had just arrived over the trail, insisted on going the rounds with a party of us, and in order to shake him we entered a variety theatre, where my maudlin friend soon fell asleep in his seat.  The rest of us left the theatre, and after seeing the sights I wandered back to the vaudeville, finding the performance over and my friend still sound asleep.  I awoke him, never letting him know that I had been absent for hours, and after rubbing his eyes open, he said:  “Reed, is it all over?  No dance or concert?  They give a good show here, don’t they?”

CHAPTER XIX

THE CHEYENNE AND ARAPAHOE CATTLE COMPANY