In our traffic with the old chief's people we had given them a liberal exchange for their skins and peltries--far more than they would have received from the traders--we being satisfied with about one hundred per cent. profit on the goods we traded them instead of three to four hundred per cent. as was the custom with men regularly engaged in the trade.
The Indians were not slow to see that we were giving them more for their stuff than they usually received from the traders, and our commerce with them increased. Soon we found that we were gathering in so much of this material that it became a serious question how we were going to smuggle it into our storeroom at Fort Larned, or beyond there, without Weisselbaum's knowledge, or, in case we sold our skins to him, how to account for those we had traded from the Indians. He had a trader's license from the government, and we had nothing of the kind. According to law, we were trespassing on his rights, in which the commanding officer at Fort Larned was in duty bound to protect him. When we began trading with the Indians we had not thought of these difficulties, but, having got into it, we determined to bluff it out and trust to luck for some future plan to suggest itself to us for getting through.
On the plains a prairie fire is always something to be dreaded, for with the usual breeze, which often amounts to a gale, a fire in heavy, dry grass is almost invariably uncontrollable and a source of terror to the luckless traveller who happens to be in its track.
Such a fire originates most commonly from the embers of a camp-fire--left by some careless or inexperienced traveller--blown by a rising wind out into the adjacent dry grass or, in the spring of the year, by fires purposely set out in the old grass by the Indians to clear the ground for the next crop.
An essay might be written on prairie fires and the dangers from them and on the best means of fighting them. I have now only to tell of how one of us was caught in one.
For the next few days after Wild Bill and Captain Saunders had left us we were all busy taking in wolf pelts. The season was fast passing, and we yet lacked several hundred skins of the three thousand that we had declared that we would gather before quitting.