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Updated: September 10, 2025
"It was a fifteen-mile ride. We planned to pick up four men from the ranches on the way down, and get to 'Kep' Queen's camp at daylight. We had been told that there were five men in the camp, that they had been in the Pryor Creek woods for two days, and that it was their plan to hold up the flyer from the north next evening.
They had started on their fifteen-mile ride in the cool of the evening, and following the road back for a few miles were just striking off toward the distant hedge of cotton woods that lined the little stream by her home when the storm came upon them.
Save for the freshness of early summer, with its background of green and the rarified atmosphere of the elevated plain, the scene before us might be compared to a winter drift of buffalo, ten years previous. Riding down the farther slope, we reached our camp in time for a late breakfast, the fifteen-mile ride having whetted our appetites.
Ah! he is the devil of a man," and, shaking his head ponderously, the jolly old Boer departed, and presently John saw him riding away upon a fat little shooting-pony which cannot have weighed much more than himself, but that cantered off with him on his fifteen-mile journey as though he were a feather-weight.
Just set there, looking fishy-eyed at the floor. Next morning I met Eben prancing around in his Sunday clothes and with a necktie on that would make a rainbow look like a mourning badge. "Hello!" says I. "You seem to be pretty chipper. You ain't going to start for that fifteen-mile ride through the woods to Ostable, be you? Looks to me as if 'twas going to rain."
Apparently, on the face of the returns, when half of the fifteen-mile course had been run, the victory was likely to be carried off by Whipple, the fleet-winged Allandale chap who had played right field during the baseball matches; "Just" Smith; himself; or possibly Nick Lang. There was always a dim and remote possibility, however, of a dark horse forging to the front on the home stretch.
Everything had to be taken there, and each regiment, which was a small canvas town in itself, had to depend entirely upon its own resources. Dotted here and there throughout the entire expanse of the fifteen-mile reservation, these cities of tents were seen, and the brave men who lived in them depended upon themselves and each other for what little entertainment they got.
So Bud rose before daylight the next morning, tied on the makeshift snowshoes Cash had contrived, and made the fifteen-mile trip to Alpine and back before dark. He brought candy for Lovin Child, tended that young gentleman through a siege of indigestion because of the indulgence, and waited impatiently until he was fairly certain that the wardrobe he had ordered had arrived at the post-office.
For the branding was not yet finished, and the storm threatened more malignantly. Chip saddled Silver, his own particular "drifter," eyed the clouds appraisingly and swung into the saddle for a fifteen-mile ride to the home ranch and his wife, the Little Doctor. "You can make it, all right, if yuh half try," he encouraged. "It isn't going to cut loose before dark, if I know the signs.
Runnymede homestead to which that strange fatality was again driving me was thirty miles from Burke's camp; but, by losing a few miles in a slight detour, I could make a twenty-mile stage to Alf Jones's, and, next day, a fifteen-mile stage to the station. This rate of travelling, with frequent holidays, was fast enough for a man without official hopes, or corresponding fear of the sack.
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