The moon was not yet risen and the sky was covered with clouds, so it was extremely dark.  We took along our lantern, but it did not make much impression on the darkness.  When we reached the road we found that everywhere we stepped we went over our shoe-tops in the soft dust.  We beard a deep, strange creaking noise, mixed with what sounded like reports of a pistol, around the bend in the trail.  Soon we could make out what seemed to be a long herd of cattle winding towards us, with what might have been a circus tent swaying about behind them.

“What’s coming?” we asked of a boy who was going by.

“Old Henderson,” he replied.

“What’s he got?”

“Just his outfit.”

“But what are all the cattle?”

“His team.”

“Not one team?”

“Yes; eleven yoke.”

“Twenty-two oxen in one team?”

“Yes; and four wagons.”

The head yoke of oxen was now opposite to us, swaying about from side to side and swirling their tails in the air, but still pressing forward at the rate of perhaps a mile and a half or two miles an hour.  Far back along the procession we could dimly see a man walking in the dust beside the last yoke, swinging a long whip which cracked in the air like a rifle.  Behind rolled and swayed the four great canvas-topped wagons, tied behind one another.  We watched the strange procession go by.  There was only one man, without doubt Henderson, grizzled and seemingly sixty years old.  The wagon wheels were almost as tall as he was, and the tires were four inches wide.  The last wagon disappeared up the trail in the dust and darkness.

“Well,” said Jack, “I think when I start out driving at this time of night with twenty-two guileless oxen and four ten-ton wagons that I’ll want to get somewhere pretty badly.”  Then we went back to the Rattletrap.

X:  AMONG THE MOUNTAINS

After we got back to the Rattletrap we promised ourselves plenty of Sport the next day watching the freighters with their long teams and wagon trains.  Jack could not recover from his first glimpse of Henderson.

“Rather a neat little turnout to take a young lady out driving with,” he said, after we had gone to bed.  “Twenty-two oxen and four wagons.  Plenty of room.  Take along her father and mother.  And the rest of the family.  And her school-mates.  And the whole town.  Good team to go after the doctor with if somebody was sick—­mile and a half an hour.  That trotting-cow man at Yankton ought to come up here and show Henderson a little speed.  Still, I dare say Henderson could beat Old Browny on a good day for sleeping, and when he didn’t have Blacky to pall him along.”