The man said, “Didn’t you agree to send a runner on ahead to notify that lady that you were coming so she could have the grub cooked for your dinner?”

But the Capt. never answered the question, for before he could speak, there was such a clapping of hands and laughter from all the men that it would have been impossible to have heard him if he had tried.

After the boys had stopped cheering, the Capt. said, “You have the laugh on me now boys, but you wait, and I will get even with you, and he that laughs last laughs best.”

We reached the settlement about the middle of the afternoon and we found our horses in much better condition than we expected to.

We staid here all the next day as we were told that several of the farmers near there wanted to purchase horses from us and would come as soon as they heard that we were there.

Before night we had sold thirty-one horses at a fair price.  About noon of that day the Capt. and I were sitting under a tree having a smoke when a little girl came to us and said, “Capt., mama says you and Mr. Drannan come and take dinner with us.”

As neither of us knew her, the Capt. asked where she lived and who her mama was.

She said, “Come on, and I’ll show you,” and when we went with her, it proved to be the same place where we had dined the last time we were at the settlement.

Their name was “Jones.”  The man and his wife met us on the porch and shook hands with us, and the lady said, “Capt., you have been very lucky in killing Indians and pretty lucky in getting something to eat with us.  You had some of our first picking of peas last spring, and you will have some of our first turnips today.”

The Capt. told her that of all vegetables, he liked young turnips best.  She said that she had enough for dinner and supper too, and that we might consider ourselves invited to supper too.

We ate dinner with this hospitable family, and then we went back to the corral and the selling of our horses, which commenced soon after we got there, as the farmers came early in the day.

That night we paid the herder for his care of the horses, and then we pulled out for Dallas.

CHAPTER XI.

I do not remember how many days it took us to reach Dallas, but it was in the middle of October when we rode into that city.

This was in the fall of fifty-eight, and the news had just reached Dallas that gold had been discovered on Cherry creek in the territory of Colorado, and the excitement was intense.  All over the city people talked of nothing else but gold, and of all the exaggeration stories about gold mines that I had ever heard, the ones told there were the most incredible.  The parties who brought the news to Dallas had not been to the mines themselves, but had been told these wonderful stories at Bent’s Fort.

Capt.  McKee caught the gold fever right away, and he said to me, “I am going to get up a company in the spring and go to those new gold mines.  Don’t you want to go with me?”