Page:Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains.djvu/462

350 get my hat. I told him no, that I would not take it now, but let it go until next spring when I returned. He said to call and get it any time, saying: "You won it fair."

After we had ridden but a short distance I told Uncle Kit how I came to win the hat, and he said: "I think them St. Louis men are gentlemen, but I don't propose to have any one write up my life. I have got plenty to keep me as long as I live and I do not like notoriety." And just here I would say, that to a man that roughed it out on the plains in those days as we old frontiersmen had to do, they did not feel that a history of their lives would be fit to go before the public, for as Uncle Kit said: "A man on the frontier had to undergo many hardships, that if written up true, just as they occurred, people in the civilized countries would not believe them when they read it."

On my arrival at Taos I bought ten Mexican jacks or burros to use for pack animals on the trip that we were about to start upon. After that we started for Bent's Fort where we joined Buffalo Bill and Col. Bent and struck out for the "Picket Wire"--Purgatoire--on a buffalo hunt.

Here we found buffalo plenty and enjoyed two days successful hunting, and I must say that a more jolly crowd I was never out with than those three men were on a trip of this kind. Buffalo Bill, who was as good-natured a man as a person would wish to meet, was able to furnish amusement for the entire crowd. Col. Bent himself was no mean Nimrod, and Uncle Kit did not take a back seat on such occasions.