Snow did as ordered. One, two, three, ten cans went into the air. Preston missed none. Finally the boy threw, at Preston's command, two at a time and both were plugged before they came down. Then as Snow picked up another one Preston shot it out of his hand, and he tried to quit and return to the bean kettle, whereupon Preston bored a hole through Snow's sombrero without cutting off a hair or bruising his scalp, although it was plain to see that while Snow was no fresh tenderfoot from the effete East, but a seasoned young bullwhacker and plainsman, he was more than uneasy. The boy said afterward that while he had a whole lot of confidence in Preston's marksmanship he knew he had drunk at least a pint of whisky--the worst of the squirrel variety at that--for had he not taken the last swig out of a flask, thrown it almost at Snow and sent its splinters in every direction by a shot from his Remington? Sober, said Snow, Preston would not have been so bad, but drunk--he objected to further participation in the William Tell business and he entered his protest. When he discovered that the chambers of Preston's revolver were temporarily empty, Snow quietly took a rifle from its leather fastenings on the side of a prairie schooner. His move looked ominous to his tormentor. Preston was a coward, as were all of that class of killers in those days. He was an engineer of a bull team of seven yokes and a good man at his business, but a bully, a braggart and a coward, whose victims usually were known to be peaceful and who were unarmed or unprepared to defend themselves. He was not the heroic figure of the almost forgotten wild west--the brave and big-hearted fellow who fought sometimes for his rights or what he considered his rights. Preston was just a plain murderer, who had taken a place among rough but honest frontiersmen, chased from an orderly community somewhere in God's country--then east of the Missouri, now anywhere from the Atlantic to the Pacific--because of some dark crime he had committed, no doubt. All day long we had been fording the North Platte at this point--Sidney crossing--a distance of at least a half a mile, including a small island of sand and a few bushes. It was the last trainload of provisions for the season we were taking north to the government's beneficiaries--the Ogalala Sioux and the Cheyennes. We had seventy teams, each of seven yokes, and two wagons, and as the Platte is a swift-running stream at this point and there is quicksand between the south shore and the island, it was necessary to "jack up" on blocks some of our loads on the wagons and double and treble teams, sometimes using as many as twenty-five yokes of oxen on one wagon and a half dozen men, belly deep in the mush ice, punching the bulls. The water was in places up to the tops of the wheels. It was a sun-up to sun-down job from corral to corral.