To console himself, he went into a condition of blind drunkenness, and remained in it till morning. At this camp we cached a couple of bottles of whiskey, and then solemnly averred, next morning, that he had swallowed them. To all his denials we were incredulous, and we narrated, with great minuteness, how he drank one bottle after another, filling a pint cup at a time, and draining it at a gulp. He finally began to believe that we were right, and for the rest of the journey he kept comparatively sober. [Sidenote: TWO-BOTTLE CAMP.] On our return, two weeks later, we had a long day’s journey before us to reach “Two-Bottle Camp,” as we had named it. In the morning we made a general confession to the old fellow, and owned up to the theft and concealment of the bottles. His rage at the deception practised upon him was great, but it was not equal to his joy at knowing there was happiness ahead. Never on the whole journey did he exert himself more than on that day to keep the wagon in motion, and enable us to reach the whiskey-hunting ground by sunset. To him the camp of the Two Bottles was like a harbor for which the storm-tossed mariner hopes and prays when the gale is upon him, and his ship is lying at the mercy of the wind; and as soon as we reached it, he made a rapid break for the cache, and opened it before the wagon was fairly halted. He forgave us everything, and for that evening we had a millennium on a small scale. We compelled him to retain one bottle for the festivities of the next evening, as we wanted him to go to town sober, and consequently determined to exhume the keg, and put it in the wagon without his knowledge. Everything was lovely; the keg was secured, and when we reached Denver, we pretended to discover it in the office whence we had started. In the days of the great emigration overland in 1849 and ‘50, the emigrants frequently found their wagons too heavily burdened, and were obliged to throw away or cache a large part of their loads. When they cached their goods, the Indians generally found them, as the work was almost always done carelessly and in haste, so that traces of it could be plainly seen. One old plainsman once described to me a cache which was made by a party to which he belonged. “We found,” said he, “that we must lighten up our wagons; and so we concluded to stop a day or two, make a cache, and give our animals a chance to rest. We were near the Wind River Mountains, and Indians were not abundant. We had seen none for several days, and thought we could rely upon doing our work without their seeing us. We were in camp when we decided to make the cache, and at daylight next morning two of us started out to find a good place.