On the 8th of October, Packard offered the dubious joys of his stage-line for the first time to the public; and began to see a faint prospect of return on his rather extravagant investment of energy and time. But his satisfaction died stillborn. The Marquis's sanguine temperament had once more proved the undoing of what might have been a profitable venture. The mail contract, which the easy-going Frenchman had thought that he had secured, proved illusory. Packard, who had been glad to leave that part of the business to his principal, discovered, as soon as he began to inquire for the mail-bags, that what his principal had actually secured from the Postmaster-General was not a contract at all, but merely a chance to bid when the annual offers for star routes came up for bidding the following May. It was a body blow to the putative owner of a stage-line. Long after the last of his Deadwood coaches had been rattled to kindlings in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Packard told the last chapter of his connection with the Medora and Black Hills Forwarding and Transportation Company. "No mail contract; hardly a month of earnings before winter, when there was no chance of paying operating expenses; responsible for the pay-roll, but not on it; with a private pay-roll and expenses equal to or greater than my private income; with all my cash savings gone in the preliminary expenses of putting on the line, and finally with no chance, under my contract, of getting a cent from the stage-line before that nebulous time when it had paid for itself. The Marquis soon returned and I told him I could not consider myself bound by the contract. The delay in providing funds I had condoned by staying with the proposition, but a mail contract which was essential in helping to pay expenses was not even a possibility for seven or more months in the future. I stayed until another man was hired and left my duties with a grunt of relief."[9] [Footnote 9: It was Packard's stage-line which brought Scipio le Moyne (in Owen Wister's novel) from the Black Hills to Medora to become the substitute cook of the Virginian's mutinous "outfit." The cook whom the Virginian kicked off the train at Medora, because he was too anxious to buy a bottle of whiskey, is said to have been a man named Macdonald. He remained in the Bad Lands as cook for one of the ranches, but he was such an inveterate drinker that "Nitch" Kendley was forced to take drastic measures. Finding him unconscious one day, just outside of Medora, he tied him hand and foot to the sagebrush. The cook struggled twelve hours in the broiling sun before he could free himself. Tradition has it that he did not touch another drop of liquor for three years.]