During the fall, Smith and Campbell grew tired of the business and wanted to quit. I bought the outfit, and straightway hired two men to work for me, and started out killing buffaloes more energetically than ever. One of my skinners was a Mexican and the other a man named Perkins. Up to this time I had hunted north of the Kansas Pacific railroad, and as far west as Fort Wallace. As the fall advanced, I began ranging further south, as the buffaloes were becoming somewhat scarce. I was moving toward a country of future trouble--trouble with Indians--and to a region where in time I should meet with more adventure than I had ever dreamed of. We moved south of Hays City about ten miles and came to a boiling spring that flowed from an opening in solid rock. Here we decided to make our permanent camp for the winter, so we built a picket house and a big dugout, expecting to dry a lot of buffalo meat for market, but finally abandoned this scheme. Our camp was on a main-traveled road leading to Hays City. Freighters and hunters urged me to establish a road ranch or store, where such supplies as were used in that country could be purchased in reasonable quantities. Having some spare money, I stocked up with tobacco, whisky and a general line of groceries, and employed a man named Billy Reynolds to run the place for me, while I devoted my time to killing buffaloes. Many a jolly company gathered at the road ranch at the boiling spring. The sale of whisky was a common practice in those days, as whisky was freely used by frontiersmen, and its sale was expected as a matter of course. Other conditions were too hard and too pressing for the question of the morals of the traffic to be raised as it was in later years, when the country became more thickly settled, and an entirely new order of things was established. I was well acquainted with Reynolds, and liked him, having formed his acquaintance on the Custer expedition to Camp Supply in 1868 when he was a mule-driver. He was a friendly, whole-souled kind of fellow, and knew just how to treat men to get their trade. I made good money out of this venture until 1871 when the income abruptly and permanently ceased--during my absence Reynolds sold the whole outfit and skipped the country, without even telling me good bye. I had been absent two weeks when I returned one day to find only the empty building. I never again heard of Billy Reynolds. I doubt that his robbing me was ever to his final advantage. Money obtained in that way never brought good luck, even in the Plains country, where men were judged by rougher standards than prevailed further east.