In the old days in the ranch country we depended upon game for fresh meat.  Nobody liked to kill a beef, and although now and then a maverick yearling might be killed on the round-up, most of us looked askance at the deed, because if the practice of beef-killing was ever allowed to start, the rustlers—­the horse thieves and cattle thieves—­would be sure to seize on it as an excuse for general slaughter.  Getting meat for the ranch usually devolved upon me.  I almost always carried a rifle when I rode, either in a scabbard under my thigh, or across the pommel.  Often I would pick up a deer or antelope while about my regular work, when visiting a line camp or riding after the cattle.  At other times I would make a day’s trip after them.  In the fall we sometimes took a wagon and made a week’s hunt, returning with eight or ten deer carcasses, and perhaps an elk or a mountain sheep as well.  I never became more than a fair hunter, and at times I had most exasperating experiences, either failing to see game which I ought to have seen, or committing some blunder in the stalk, or failing to kill when I fired.  Looking back, I am inclined to say that if I had any good quality as a hunter it was that of perseverance.  “It is dogged that does it” in hunting as in many other things.  Unless in wholly exceptional cases, when we were very hungry, I never killed anything but bucks.

Occasionally I made long trips away from the ranch and among the Rocky Mountains with my ranch foreman Merrifield; or in later years with Tazewell Woody, John Willis, or John Goff.  We hunted bears, both the black and the grizzly, cougars and wolves, and moose, wapiti, and white goat.  On one of these trips I killed a bison bull, and I also killed a bison bull on the Little Missouri some fifty miles south of my ranch on a trip which Joe Ferris and I took together.  It was rather a rough trip.  Each of us carried only his slicker behind him on the saddle, with some flour and bacon done up in it.  We met with all kinds of misadventures.  Finally one night, when we were sleeping by a slimy little prairie pool where there was not a stick of wood, we had to tie the horses to the horns of our saddles; and then we went to sleep with our heads on the saddles.  In the middle of the night something stampeded the horses, and away they went, with the saddles after them.  As we jumped to our feet Joe eyed me with an evident suspicion that I was the Jonah of the party, and said:  “O Lord!  I’ve never done anything to deserve this.  Did you ever do anything to deserve this?”

In addition to my private duties, I sometimes served as deputy sheriff for the northern end of our county.  The sheriff and I crisscrossed in our public and private relations.  He often worked for me as a hired hand at the same time that I was his deputy.  His name, or at least the name he went by, was Bill Jones, and as there were in the neighborhood several Bill Joneses—­Three Seven Bill Jones, Texas Bill Jones, and the like—­the