At noon we went down to the camp of the freighters on the outskirts of town, near Rapid Creek.  There must have been fifty “outfits”—­Jack said that was the right word—­and several hundred mules, as many oxen, and a few horses.  The animals were, most of them, wandering about wherever they pleased, the mules and horses taking their dinner out of nosebags, and the mules keeping up a gentle exercise by kicking at one another.  It seemed a hopeless confusion, but the men were sitting about on the ground, calmly cooking their dinners over little camp-fires.  One man, whom we had got acquainted with in the morning at Smith’s, asked us to have dinner with him, and made the invitation so pressing that we accepted.  He had several gallon’s of coffee and plenty of bacon and canned fruit, and a peculiar kind of bread which he had baked himself.

[Illustration:  ’Gene Starts a Cook-Book]

“I’m a-thinking,” he said, “there ain’t enough sal’ratus in that there bread; but I’m a poor cook, anyhow.”

The bread seemed to us to be already composed chiefly of saleratus, so his apology struck us as unnecessary.  He very kindly wrote out the receipt on a shingle for Jack, but I stole it away from him after we got home and burned it in the camp-fire; so we escaped that.

“Your pancakes are bad enough,” I said to him.  “We don’t care to try your saleratus bread.”

Jack was a good deal worked up about the loss of his receipt, and experimented a long time to produce something like the freighter’s bread without it; but as Snoozer wouldn’t try the stuff he made, and he was afraid to do so himself, nothing came of it.

We enjoyed our dinner with the man, however, and Jack added further to his vocabulary in finding that the drivers of the ox teams were called “bullwhackers,” and those of the mules and horses “muleskinners.”

In the afternoon we climbed the hill above our camp.  It gave us a long view off to the east across the level country, while away to the west were the mountain-peaks rising higher and higher.  It was still cold, and the raw northeast wind moaned through the pines in a way that made us think of winter.

We went to bed early that night, so as to get a good start for Deadwood the next day.  We brought the horses down from the ranch in the evening, blanketed them, and stood them out of the wind among some trees.

“Four o’clock must see us rolling out of our comfortable beds and getting ready to start,” said Jack, as we turned in.  “We must play we are freighters.”

Jack planned better than he knew; we really “rolled out” in an exceedingly lively manner at three o’clock.  We were sleeping soundly at that hour, when we were awakened by the motion of the wagon.  Jack and I sat up.  It was swaying from side to side, and we could hear the wheels bumping on the stones.  The back end was considerably lower than the front.