We dismounted and walked up near them, and by the looks of the ground which was torn and tramped for quite a distance we decided that they had been in that condition quite a while.  Jim said, “How in the plague, Will, are we going to get these critters apart?  They are too plaguey poor to eat, so we don’t want to kill them, and they will die if we leave them in this fix; what shall we do, Will?”

I thought a minute and said, “Can’t we take our little ax and chop one of their horns off?”

He said, “I hadn’t thought of that, but bring me the ax and I will try it.”

I ran to the pack horse and got the ax.  He said, “Now you go back to the horses; for if I get them loose they may want to fight us.”

So I went to the horses and looked back to see what Jim was doing.  He went up to them with the ax drawn ready to strike but it was quite a bit before they were quiet enough for him to get a good hit at them.  At last he made a strike and down went one of the deer.  Instead of striking the deer’s horn he struck him right back of the horn and killed him instantly; when Jim saw what he had done he made another hit at the dead buck’s horn and freed the live one, which ran thirty or forty yards and stopped and turned around and shook his head at us a half a dozen times and then he trotted away as if nothing had happened.

Jim laughed and said, “He never stopped to thank us, did he?  Well he ain’t much different from some people.”  I said, “Why, Jim he meant “thank you” when he shook his head at us; that is all the way he could say it, you know,” to which he replied, “Well, I saved one of them any way.”

Nothing occurred of interest from this time on until we reached our journey’s end at Taos, New Mexico.  Here we found Uncle Kit and his wife both enjoying good health and a warm welcome for his boy Willie, and his old friend Jim Bridger.

After supper that night we told Uncle Kit that we had traveled from the Sacramento river, California to Taos, New Mexico in thirty-three days, and that we never saw a hostile Indian on the trip, and neither had had any trouble of any kind to detain us a half an hour on the whole trip.  He said, “That is a wonderful story to hear, when there are so many wild Indians in that part of the country.  Now boys tell me what route you came.”

We marked out the route by different streams and mountains.  He looked at the map we had drawn and said, “I will venture to say there is not two men in all the country that could make that trip over that route and get through alive.  I will say again, boys, it is some thing wonderful to think of, and you must have been protected by a higher power than your selves to get through in safety.”

We staid with Uncle Kit a couple of weeks and rested up, and then we struck out for Bent’s Fort to make up our crew to go to our trapping ground for our winter’s work.