XVIII. BILL DEAN, THE TEXAN RANGER.[12]

XVIII. BILL DEAN, THE TEXAN RANGER.^[12]

Rare wags may be found among the Texas Volunteers, yet the funniest fellow of all is a happy-go-lucky chap named Bill Dean, one of Chevallier’s spy company, and said to be one of the best “seven-up” players in all Texas. While at Corpus Christi, a lot of us were sitting out on the stoop of the Kinney House, early one morning, when along came Bill Dean. He did not know a single soul in the crowd, although he knew we were all bound for the Rio Grande; yet the fact that the regular formalities of an introduction had not been gone through with, did not prevent his stopping short in his walk and accosting us. His speech, or harangue, or whatever it may be termed, will lose much in the telling, yet I will endeavour to put it upon paper in as good a shape as possible.

“Oh, yes,” said he, with a knowing leer of the eye: “oh, yes; all going down among the robbers on the Rio Grande, are you? Fine times you’ll have, over the left. I’ve been there myself, and done what a great many of you won’t do—I come back; but if I didn’t see nateral h—ll—in August at that—I am a teapot. Lived eight days on one poor hawk and three blackberries—couldn’t kill a prairie rat on the whole route to save us from starvation. The ninth day come, and we struck a small streak of good luck—a horse give out and broke down, plumb out in the centre of an open prairie—not a stick big enough to tickle a rattlesnake with, let alone killing him. Just had time to save the critter by shootin’ him, and that was all, for in three minutes longer he’d have died a nateral death. It didn’t take us long to butcher him, nor to cut off some chunks of meat and stick ’em on our ramrods; but the cookin’ was another matter. I piled up a heap of prairie grass, for it was high and dry, and sot it on fire; but it flashed up like powder, and went out as quick. But—”

“But,” put in one of his hearers, “but how did you cook your horse-meat after that?”

“How?”

“Yes, how?”

“Why, the fire caught the high grass close by, and the wind carried the flames streakin’ across the prairie. I followed up the fire, holding my chunk of meat directly over the blaze, and the way we went it was a caution to anything short of locomotive doin’s. Once in a while a little flurry of wind would come along, and the fire would get a few yards the start; but I’d brush upon her, lap her with my chunk, and then we’d have it again, nip and chuck. You never seed such a tight race—it was beautiful.”

“Very, we’ve no doubt,” ejaculated one of the listeners, interrupting the mad wag just in season to give him a little breath: “but did you cook your meat in the end?”

“Not bad I didn’t. I chased that d—d fire a mile and a half, the almightiest hardest race you ever heer’d tell on, and never give it up until I run her right plump into a wet marsh: there the fire and chunk of horse-meat came out even—a dead heat, especially the meat.”

“But wasn’t it cooked?” put in another one of the listeners.

“Cooked!—no!—just crusted over a little. You don’t cook broken-down horse-flesh very easy, no how; but when it comes to chasing up a prairie fire with a chunk of it, I don’t know which is the toughest, the meat or the job. You’d have laughed to split yourself to have seen me in that race—to see the fire leave me at times and then to see me brushin’ up on her agin, humpin’ and movin’ myself as though I was runnin’ agin some of those big ten mile an hour Gildersleeves in the old States. But I’m a goin’ over to Jack Haynes’s to get a cocktail and some breakfast—I’ll see you all down among the robbers on the Rio Grande.”