fits"--Jack said that was the right word--and several hundred
mules, as many oxen, and a few horses. The animals were, most of
them, wandering about wherever they pleased, the mules and horses
taking their dinner out of nosebags, and the mules keeping up a
gentle exercise by kicking at one another. It seemed a hopeless
confusion, but the men were sitting about on the ground, calmly
cooking their dinners over little camp-fires. One man, whom we
had got acquainted with in the morning at Smith's, asked us to
have dinner with him, and made the invitation so pressing that we
accepted. He had several gallon's of coffee and plenty of bacon
and canned fruit, and a peculiar kind of bread which he had baked
himself.

[Illustration: 'Gene Starts a Cook-Book]

"I'm a-thinking," he said, "there ain't enough sal'ratus in
that there bread; but I'm a poor cook, anyhow."

The bread seemed to us to be already composed chiefly of
saleratus, so his apology struck us as unnecessary. He very
kindly wrote out the receipt on a shingle for Jack, but I stole
it away from him after we got home and burned it in the
camp-fire; so we escaped that.

"Your pancakes are bad enough," I said to him. "We don't care
to try your saleratus bread."

Jack was a good deal worked up about the loss of his receipt,
and experimented a long time to produce something like the
freighter's bread without it; but as Snoozer wouldn't try the
stuff he made, and he was afraid to do so himself, nothing came
of it.

We enjoyed our dinner with the man, however, and Jack added
further to his vocabulary in finding that the drivers of the ox
teams were called "bullwhackers," and those of the mules and
horses "muleskinners."

In the afternoon we climbed the hill above our camp. It gave
us a long view off to the east across the level country, while
away to the west were the mountain-peaks rising higher and
higher. It was still cold, and the raw northeast wind moaned
through the pines in a way that made us think of winter.

We went to bed early that night, so as to get a good start
for Deadwood the next day. We brought the horses down from the
ranch in the evening, blanketed them, and stood them out of the
wind among some trees.

"Four o'clock must see us rolling out of our comfortable beds
and getting ready to start," said Jack, as we turned in. "We must
play we are freighters."

Jack planned better than he knew; we really "rolled out" in
an exceedingly l