I answered that I did intend to eat him, but I thought now I had better turn him loose.

Jim said, “That won’t do, Will, for he would kill someone before he cleared himself of the crowd.  Tie him up to a tree, and we can kill him and take the meat with us when we leave here.”

I tied him up as Jim thought best, although I pitied the little fellow and had rather have let him loose and seen him scamper away over the hills to join his friends in freedom.

The men set to work skinning and getting the meat ready to cook for supper.  We now had fresh meat enough to last the entire outfit nearly a week.

After we had finished supper Jim told the women to get ready to dance, “for,” he said, “we will have more music tonight than we have had for a long time.”

One of the old ladies asked him, how he could tell when the wolves would howl more one night than another, and she said, “every time that you have said they would howl, they have made such a noise that none of us could sleep.”  Jim answered, “this will be the worst night for them to howl you have ever heard, and I will tell you why.  You see, all those Buffalos have been dressed here at the camp, and the Coyotes will smell the blood for miles away from here, and they will follow the scent until they get to us, and as they cannot get to the meat they will vent their disappointment in howling.  So you see why I say the ladies will have a plenty of music to dance to.”  And sure enough, as soon as it commenced growing dark the din commenced, and there was no sleep for anyone in that camp until nearly daylight the next morning.  A number of times that night I went out perhaps fifty yards from the wagons and saw them running in every direction.  I could have silenced them by firing once among them, but this I did not dare to do, for I did not know how many Indians might be in hearing of the report of my gun, and I thought it the better policy to hear the howling of the wolves than to have a fight with the Indians.

The next morning I called the scouts together and divided them into four squads, and we started out to examine the country in all four directions for Indians or the signs of them, our calculation being to investigate the country for five miles in every direction.

I told the men that if we saw no Indians or the signs of them that day that we would have a chance to sleep that night for I would fire a few shots among the Coyotes and stop their music, for that time at least.  I and the men that went with me took a direct western course.  After traveling perhaps five miles we struck a fresh Indian trail; the Indians had passed along there the evening before going in a southern direction.  We followed it some distance, and I came to the conclusion that there were four or five hundred Indians in the band, and I knew by the direction they were traveling that they would have to go fifteen or twenty miles before they could find water, so I knew we were perfectly safe from this band.  So after explaining this to my companions, I said, “Let us go back to camp.”