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Younkins had been accustomed to see buffalo for so long that he did not think it anything worth mentioning that he had seen vast numbers of the creatures already. So, as they pressed on, the boys strained their eyes in the distance, looking for buffalo.
"Me, too," answered Sandy, soberly. "But this is just about as fine as anything can be. Only think of it, Oscar! There are buffalo and antelopes within ten or fifteen miles of here. I know, for Younkins told me so. And Indians, not wild Indians, but tame ones that are at peace with the whites. It seems too good to have happened to us; doesn't it, Oscar?"
"Younkins says that he can walk all over his melon-patch on the other side of the Fork, stepping only on the melons and never touching the ground once," said Oscar, one day, later in the season, as they were feasting themselves on one of the delicious watermelons that now so plentifully dotted their own corn-field. "What a big story!" exclaimed both of the other boys at once.
The Cheyennes had shot into the party and had killed four and wounded two, at a point known as Buffalo Creek, some one hundred miles or so up the Republican Fork. It was a daring piece of effrontery, as there were two military posts not very far away, Fort Kearney above and Fort Riley below. "But they are far enough away by this time," said Younkins, with some bitterness.
It was very good of Younkins to take so much trouble on their account, and the least they could do was to show him proper hospitality. "What is all this about stakes and quarter-sections, anyway, father?" asked Sandy. "I'm sure I don't know." "He doesn't know what quarter-sections are!" shouted Charlie. "Oh, my! what an ignoramus!"
The emigrants tramped through the tall, lush grass that covered every foot of the new Kansas soil, their eyes fixed eagerly on the log-cabin before them. The latch-string hung out hospitably from the door of split "shakes," and the party entered without ado. Everything was just as Younkins had last left it.
Younkins, ashamed, apparently, of his burst of temper, stooped down, and discovering that Major's wounds were not very serious, extracted the shot, plucked a few leaves of some plant that he seemed to know all about, and pressed the juice into the wounds made by the shot. The boys looked on with silent admiration. This man knew everything, they thought.
The shortest way to Battles's was by a ford farther down the river, and not by the way of the Younkins place. So, crossing the creek on a fallen tree near where Sandy had shot his famous flock of ducks, and then steering straight across the flat bottom-land on the opposite side, the party struck into a trail that led through the cottonwoods skirting the west bank of the stream.
"Are you a free-State man?" he asked Younkins. This was a home-thrust. Younkins came from a slave State; he was probably a pro-slavery man. "I'm neither a free-State man nor yet a pro-slavery man," he said, slowly, and with great deliberation. "I'm just for Younkins all the time. Fact is," he continued, "where I came from most of us are pore whites.
"Why, that's only a beetle, after all," cried Sandy, who, sitting on a stump near by, had been a deeply interested listener to his father's description of the maul. "Certainly, my son; a maul is what people in the Eastern States would call a beetle; but you ask Younkins, some day, if he has a beetle over at his place. He, I am sure, would never use the name beetle."
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