We remained in that wretched Fork for five hours, fishing out of it, as it seemed, everything but our own property. Necessarily, much besides this was lost. The infernal undertow of the stream carried all it could bear with it, away. Not only had it plundered me of my stage-wardrobe, but of the whole of my wearing apparel, exclusive of that I then stood upright in. Not even a single shirt was left me. At length, when it was evident no hope remained of finding it, sulkily angry, wet and chilled not only to the bone, but to my very marrow, I struggled, with the well-nigh as miserable Bill, to the farther bank. Here we found Captain Crim awaiting us. At his side, stood a consolatory keg of whiskey, and in his hand was the immortal tin-cup, so lovingly identified with daily life on the Plains, and the early history of our nation upon the Pacific coast. He was a sagaciously provident leader. Praiseworthily interested in our health, he supplied both of us with a liberal cupful of the fortifying elixir. Hungry, as well as cold, for it was now three o'clock in the afternoon, and I had eaten nothing since morning, I forgot my usual prudence, and asked him for another cupful of the inspiring fluid. "Do you think you can stand it, Mose?" was his far from unnatural inquiry. The whiskey had not yet sufficient time to put an end to the shivering produced by my protracted cold bath. My teeth were actually chattering in my head, with a castanet accompaniment to my discomfort. "Certainly-a-a-a, I can-n-n-n, Cap!" "The cup holds a good half-pint." "And I have been-n-n-n in the water ha-a-a-lf a day, Captain!" "Very well!" he replied, with a commiserating look at my drowned-rat-like appearance, "you shall have it." He very certainly would never have allowed me to soak so much inwardly, had it not been for my thorough outward soaking. Nor, indeed, but for my tribulation under my recent loss, should I have desired such an inward soaking. As I swallowed the whiskey, I felt my whole frame bursting into a tingling and generous glow. However, nothing more is remembered by me until the following morning. Then I awoke in Captain Crim's tent. I had been stripped to the skin and wrapped in a blanket. My clothes, now, alas! my only suit, had been removed from my person by his orders, and dried at a large fire, whose smouldering embers were in the last stage of inanition without the tent. They were lying beside me. It was with a somewhat sheepish look, I imagine, that I got into them, for the Captain was already out and about. What blowing up might be in store for me from such a rigid disciplinarian as he was, I could scarcely imagine. As I went, or to speak more truly, sneaked out into the sharp morning air, what was my surprise to hear him say, in a cheery voice: "Well, Mose! You are all right now, are you not? To work, my lad! I wish all my boys were like you and Bill! You worked yesterday, like a couple of heroes."