Well, we headed for a big lake about twenty miles from this Mormon’s
place. We heard there was a lot of horses ranging in that part of the
country and there found our horses, so we drove the whole bunch to an
old roundup corral that we had located that day. I had three horses in
the bunch and my partner had one. Those horses were three years old and
were not halter broke. In fact, they had not had a rope on them since
they were yearlings and then were only caught by the front feet and
thrown down to brand them. So, we had to catch them that way now. We
necked them to the extra saddle horses we had with us and turned them
out of the corral and headed them towards Montana. Just before dark we
spotted a ranch and some corrals so we headed for there. We found a man
there who had come from Michigan and taken up a homestead out on the
Canadian Prairie. He evidently was a man of some wealth as he had spent
considerable money fixing the place up. He wasn’t very keen about
letting us stay overnight. He kept sizing us up and I guess he had heard
a good deal about cowboys and rustlers and thought we were a couple of
horse thieves. We explained our condition to him and told him the
circumstances and that we were a long way from home, so he finally
decided to let us stay.
While this fellow looked like he had considerable wealth, he didn’t have
very much to eat. As he didn’t make any excuses about it, I think we had
his regular bill of fare. He didn’t have any meat, no butter or sugar or
coffee. My partner was a coffee fiend, and this fellow gave us cold milk
for breakfast. My partner was very blue all that day and said he felt
very queer, like the world was coming to an end or something terrible
was going to happen. But that was because he missed his coffee.
This man charged us ten dollars for very little to eat and a very poor
bed, and as it was not the custom to charge anyone those days for food
it made my partner very mad. When we got our horses saddled and ready to
go next morning, my partner went to the barn and as he was gone quite a
while I asked him what he was looking for. He said he was looking for
something he could steal, to get even with that old guy, but he said
this fellow was so stingy he didn’t have anything worth taking.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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