He had the cash with him, and when he pulled out his roll I regretted not having gone to twenty-five hundred, for it looked like he had brought along that much, but hell, even so, it wasn’t bad for my first time out. I had made a hundred times ten for a couple hours’ work. Later I met Allardyce at a saloon and we split the take down the middle.
“I registered at the Excelsior,” he says, “and left word at the desk for Kaller that I had changed my plans and gone on a hunting trip out west of Topeka, returning in a week, at which time I trusted he and I could do business. That,” he says, “will cover my leisurely escape from town.”
“Where are you going, Allardyce?” I asks, because he led an interesting way of life.
“Oh, St. Louis, I suppose. I’m clean there. And what about yourself, Jack? I would advise your leaving Kansas City. It is true that Kaller has nothing on you, but he will soon get the picture and I imagine might cause you discomfort. What about coming along with me? I think you have a real talent for bunco.”
He didn’t know about Amelia, you see, for I had kept him away from my hotel. After all, he was a crook.
“That might well be,” I says. “But I believe my real calling lays outdoors. I’m heading down to the buffalo country for the winter hunt.”
Allardyce stuck out his hand. “It has been a pleasure, Jack.”
“I’m real proud, Allardyce,” says I, “and I wish you the best in whatever mischief you next take up.”
That was the last I saw of him, standing there in that lowdown saloon, ordering a bottle of champagne, so anxious to begin the high life he couldn’t wait to get to where he could rightly practice it. I had the feeling he would be broke again within a day or so, for what he liked about bunco was the acting required rather than the money gained. What a professional he was! And a real nice fellow who helped me out in K.C.
I give a pittance to my creditors to show good faith and to quiet their baying for a spell, and I laid down an advance payment on a girls’ boarding school that I finally found for Amelia-it was a snob place where the students lived in, with a headmistress so stuck up she could hardly say a word.
Now I know that with the normal dirtiness of mind in which a person picks up someone else’s reminiscences, you are expecting to find sooner or later that Amelia went back to her earlier ways. People just hate to see others reform. I just have to disappoint you. There wasn’t no force on earth that could have kept Amelia from becoming a fine lady now she had got a taste of it. To give an example, if while eating in a restaurant she dropped her fork, she wouldn’t lean over and pick it off the floor, not her. That’s what servitors was for, she said. And it got so she applied the same principle to everything she done, so that if in our rooms she let a book slip from her lap to the carpet, why, she’d yank the bellpull for one of them boys in his monkey suit to run upstairs, pick up the volume, and hand it to her.
Now the only thing that worried me was she might resist being put into Miss Wamsley’s Academy for Young Ladies, which would seem right austere after that luxurious summer in the hotel, with the German, Signorina Carmella, and all, but my apprehensions proved false, for Miss Wamsley come out of England, or maybe just Boston, anyway she said stuff like “hoff” for “half,” and that was something new for Amelia to take up, and after our first trip over there to get registered, I says to my niece: “You won’t miss the Signorina?” And she says: “Don’t make me loff.”
I didn’t put the query as to whether she would miss Uncle Jack. I did not expect she would, but had no desire to hear either a lie or a painful truth. I was not so big a fool as to fail to realize that the more she become what I wanted her to be, the less thrilled she would be by my presence.
So I felt the time would never be riper for me to go buffalo hunting, freeing Amelia from association with me and also making more money with which to support her in style. I would not be back till the following spring; then maybe I would just look in at the school every other Sunday, when visitors could come for tea, and try to remember to remove the spoon before sipping. I didn’t have no other long-range plans at the moment.
After paying in advance for a half-year of that school, along with pocket money for Amelia, I didn’t have much money left again, but was able to get most of the necessary gear and supplies on credit from an outfitter, and hired me a skinner, who would not have to be paid till we come back in the spring and sold our hides. I done this at Caldwell, Kansas, which was headquarters at that time for the buffalo business. As to K.C., I had blown town in the middle of the night, leaving all my bills behind, including the hotel account. So far as I know, I owe them yet.
The buffalo range stretched from southern Nebraska down to the Colorado River in Texas. Before the railroads, it run all the way up into Canada in an unbroken sweep, the great herds moving north as the year warmed, then returning south when the first snows commenced to fall up that way.
Now when I say, as I have on occasion, that the continental herd was cut in two by the Union Pacific, I don’t mean there wasn’t plenty of animals left south of the tracks, nor north either. Indeed, there was at least ten million buffalo in 1871, for that is how many was killed on the southern plains from that year up to ’75. Ten million in five years. And I helped in that extermination to the fullest degree of my personal energy, for the simple reason that the more hides a person brought in, the more money he made. The main use of them hides when tanned was to be cut into belting for the operation of machinery. But they also made shoes of them, and harness and lap robes.
When you was a hide hunter you didn’t have no facilities nor time to deal with the flesh of the creatures you shot, other than to take an occasional tongue or hump for your own supper; so most of it was just left where the animal fell, and ate by the wolves or rotted in the sun. In later days someone discovered the bones made good fertilizer, so they come and collected them by the wagonload, ground them into powder, and farmers spread it about their acres.
That still leaves the matter of the meat, and you can’t escape the fact that there was awful waste in that area, whereas Indians generally consumed in one form or another every inch of a buffalo from his ears to the hoofs, including even the male part, from which they boiled up a glue. Yet, as you know from my story, Indians was frequently hungry long before the buffalo had been eliminated, and even more so before the white man made his appearance, prior to which they never had the horse from which to hunt, nor the gun with which to shoot a buffalo at long range while afoot.
You got to consider them things before you get to blaming us hunters, the way I see it. We was just trying to make a living, and all we cared about was the market price of hides. Sometimes you get the idea from accounts of this enterprise, wrote by men who wasn’t there, that the great army of hunters went out to exterminate every bison on the continent so as to clean up the range for cattle grazing, or to whip the Indians by destroying their source of wild food. These things happened, of course, but it wasn’t by our plan. We was just a bunch of fellows carrying Sharps rifles, and if you ever topped a rise and seen a gigantic ocean of sheer buffalo covering maybe twenty miles, you couldn’t believe the day would come when a few thousand of us had caused them millions to vanish utterly.
Still, having said that, I admit it now seems a pity. But we done it, and here’s how: in late August and early September, the hunters would go up to Nebraska, make contact with the herds and follow them southwards down to Texas as it growed colder, killing as they went, and the hunt would generally extend until March of the next year. Then in spring the hunters closed up operations and went to K.C. as we have seen, for their vacation, while the buffalo was shedding on their summer plod back north.
You didn’t use a horse in this type of hunting. You moved by foot as close as you could get to one of the little bunches that a herd divided into while grazing, you set up your crossed-stick shooting rest, laid the long barrel of the Sharps into it, and picked off animals one by one around the edge of the bunch. Now, done right, you could get away with this for quite a spell before the buffalo got wise, for they never cared about the sounds of firing nor did the others worry when their comrades dropped roundabout. The only thing that spooked them was the smell of blood.
If the wind stayed favorable, you could drop upwards of thirty animals with the remainder still grazing quietly, but much beyond that number and one bull would get a whiff of blood and stir and paw the ground, and then another animal smelled it and would bellow, which panicked the bunch and so on to the whole herd spread across five square mile of prairie, and within a minute or so you saw the tails of a monstrous stampede. Or, as happened once in a while, for there might well be other hunters a-working the far side of the same herd, the stampede would come in your direction and you’d see a remarkable horizon of horns just before you was trampled to death.
But usually that never happened, and when the herd was gone, your skinner would come up with the wagon,
