This fellow was suffering terrible when I got there. I gave him a shot
of quinine first, which I believe was in powder form and very bitter.
Then shortly after I tried to give him some more quinine but he refused
to take it, so I gave him some more morphine, but didn’t seem to relieve
him. Now I was very tired and he was cussing me all the time, so when he
would get very bad and in pain I would give him some more morphine.
Along about morning he went to sleep and wouldn’t wake up, which was all
right with me as I was getting some sleep myself.
About noon the doctor came. He tried to wake him up, but he couldn’t.
Then he took his pulse. While doing so, he picked up the morphine bottle
and said to me, “Where is the rest of that morphine?” I was sure scared
then, I knew I had given him too much. I told the doctor I had spilled
some of it. He said, “I guess you did!” He told me to heat a tub of
water at once. We put that fellow into it—and I don’t know what the
doctor done but we finally brought him to—and was I glad! I know now I
gave him an overdose, but I believe I saved his life at that, as he was
suffering terrible. The doctor said he had a bad case of pneumonia and
made arrangements to take him to a hospital and I took his place on the
beef roundup.
The boss put two of us night herding the cattle. We moved camp every day
and they put new cattle in the herd every day that they gathered and the
nights were long and cold—so we sure had a hard job.
We had a good cook that year—but like most good cooks he was sure
cranky. He couldn’t drive four horses, so the boss told me to drive the
mess wagon from one camp to the other, and we didn’t get along well at
all. We called him “Big Nose George” and he was so mean I think he hated
himself. I have seen him drop something out of his hands when he was
cooking and would jump on it and stamp it in the ground.
After we had night herded about a month we had about a thousand head in
the bunch—and the nights got long. We used to get hungry during the
night. One day I asked George for a lunch to take with us. My partner
spoke up and said, “How about a pie, George?” He looked at us like a
grizzly bear and said, “Yes, I will give you fellows pie.”
That night when we started for the herd, he handed us what looked like a
nice pie. On the way to the herd we talked about it and decided George
wasn’t such a bad fellow after all. That was a tough night and the
cattle drifted about three miles. We couldn’t carry the pie very handy,
so set it down by a cut bank where we thought we could find it if the
cattle settled down, but we didn’t get back to where we left it, which
proved to be a good thing for us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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