Page:Recollections of My Boyhood.djvu/29

 the ox had been killed, and found the stomach or paunch, as we called it, lying there on the ground; the weather being warm, it was swollen to the size of a large barrel. The game we played there with the stomach of the ox was both original and uncanny, and I am sure we never played it afterwards, for it very nearly ended in a tragedy. The sport consisted in running and butting the head against the paunch and being bounced back, the recoil being in proportion to the force of contact. The sport was found to be very exciting and there grew up a rivalry between the boys as to who could butt the hardest. There was a boy by the name of Andy Baker, much taller than I was; he was slender, had a long neck, and his hair was cut very near to the scalp. This boy was ambitious to excel all the others, and backed off so as to have a long run for it. He backed off much further than anyone had before, and then lowering his small head, charged the paunch at the top of his speed, and when within a couple of yards of the target, leaped up from the ground (the boys yelling, "Give her goss, Andy!"), and came down like a pile driver against the paunch, but he did not bound back. We gathered around to see what the matter was, and discovered that Andy had thrust his head into the stomach, which had closed so tightly around his neck that he could not withdraw his head. We took hold of his legs and pulled him out, but the joke was on Andy, and "Give her goss, Andy," was a favorite joke among the boys long after. I will add here that many years after we had settled in Oregon, Andy became a candidate for sheriff of Yamhill County, and I went down from Polk County, where I then lived, and told this adventure of his on the plains. Andy was elected.

And now I recall to mind a long march across a dry and level plain, thickly set with sage brush and greasewood, through which the breaking of a road was very heavy work for the now somewhat jaded teams; and the boys walking behind the wagons were frequently under the painful necessity of sitting down and pulling the thorns of the prickly pear out of their toes. This evening we traveled until late at night, probably ten o'clock, and camped as near as we could get to Snake River, for the riverbed was in a groove cut more than a quarter of a mile deep in the plain. In the morning we could see