The day was fast waning when we reached the camp. How the same word may mean different things! In the East the camp used to mean three or four luxurious tents comfortably carpeted and furnished with iron beds and arm-chairs, pitched under the shade of trees by a running stream, a bustling dragoman ready to conjure tea, coffee, cigars, anything and everything out of his saddlebags. Here a fire of dried buffalo dung near a creek of muddy water full of little red worms; the air poisoned by the smell of drying hides, out of which one, rather better seasoned than the others, would serve as a bed. The boasted tent turned out to be nothing more than a bit of torn canvas stretched on three poles, open to the four winds of heaven. This was our “camp” in the West. By and by “the boys” came in from hunting; a tatterdemalion crew, ragged, unkempt and very, very dirty; it would be difficult to imagine a rougher, wilder-looking lot. Throwing down their rifles on the iron-hard ground as if they rather wished to break them, they set to work to prepare supper, taking little or no notice of us. There was Captain Vogel, the boss of the outfit, Prairie Bill, his partner, Mexico Bill and two minor satellites who spoke not, and apparently had no names worth mentioning. The dung fire was quickly made up again; one man set to work to make damper in a skillet; another cut some lumps of buffalo flesh off a huge carcase and threw them into a frying-pan; a third boiled some roughly-ground coffee in the foul water of the creek—this, with the fragments of Oliver’s jackass-rabbit, constituted our feast. No whisky or other spirits, for the hunters only drank when they went into a settlement to spend and gamble away their hard-earned money. Then, to use their own expression, they would “make the place howl.” As the pannikin of coffee went round, our hosts became more communicative and began telling us hunting stories garnished with all that wealth of imprecation for which the language of the Wild West is justly famous. One story of Prairie Bill’s I jotted down in my pocket-book that night. Prairie Bill was a tall, active fellow, as lean as a lath, all wire and muscle, with keen, beadlike, black eyes and an impudent little snub nose—a regular dare-devil. Looking at him I felt half tempted to believe that his story might be true. By way of preface he swore steadily for several seconds, and having thus relieved his mind, he spat furiously, and was then in trim to proceed.