Two years later, Walker set out again with a hundred men to conquer Central America, in defiance of the British and United States squadrons, sent to catch him, and in the teeth of five armed republics. He was captured by the British, shot by Spanish Americans upon a sea beach in Honduras, and so perished, fearless to the end. XVI A. D. 1857 BUFFALO BILL The Mormons are a sect of Christians with some queer ideas, for they drink no liquor, hold all their property in common, stamp out any member who dares to think or work for himself, and believe that the more wives a man has the merrier he will be. The women, so far as I met them are like fat cows, the men a slovenly lot, and not too honest, but they are hard workers and first-rate pioneers. Because they made themselves unpopular they were persecuted, and fled from the United States into the desert beside the Great Salt Lake. There they got water from the mountain streams and made their land a garden. They only wanted to be left alone in peace, but that was a poor excuse for slaughtering emigrants. Murdering women and children is not in good taste. The government sent an army to attend to these saints, but the soldiers wanted food to eat, and the Mormons would not sell, so provisions had to be sent a thousand miles across the wilderness to save the starving troops. So we come to the herd of beef cattle which in May, 1857, was drifting from the Missouri River, and to the drovers’ camp beside the banks of the Platte. A party of red Indians on the war-path found that herd and camp; they scalped the herders on guard, stampeded the cattle and rushed the camp, so that the white men were driven to cover under the river bank. Keeping the Indians at bay with their rifles, the party marched for the settlements wading, sometimes swimming, while they pushed a raft that carried a wounded man. Always a rear guard kept the Indians from coming too near. And so the night fell. “I, being the youngest and smallest,” says one of them, “had fallen behind the others.... When I happened to look up to the moonlit sky, and saw the plumed head of an Indian peeping over the bank.... I instantly aimed my gun at his head, and fired. The report rang out sharp and loud in the night air, and was immediately followed by an Indian whoop; and the next moment about six feet of dead Indian came tumbling into the river. I was not only overcome with astonishment, but was badly scared, as I could hardly realize what I had done.” Back came Frank McCarthy, the leader, with all his men. “Who fired that shot?” “I did.” “Yes, and little Billy has killed an Indian stone-dead--too dead to skin!” At the age of nine Billy Cody had taken the war-path.