46 A CALIFORNIA TRAMP. 



messmate of mine, I am sorry to say, named Bill Casey, who 

 often told us how he had promised his little brother to bring 

 him home an " Injun's skulp." But no one's teeth chattered 

 livelier than his one night when we were given ammunition for 

 an expected attack from a party of Cheyennes. There was 

 " Irish John," with murder in his heart when angry, and an 

 old Indian campaigner with General Harney ; and " Dutch 

 John," with a Russian face, a fearful temper and a flow of 

 German oaths; and "Dutch Bill," yet a boy, but who had 

 been on a winter-bound train the year before, when, with 

 cattle frozen or stampeded, the time until spring was passed 

 on the plains. When in his German home, he lived on the 

 borders of the Black Forest, and he sometimes entertained me 

 with narrations of his adventures in that famed wilderness. 

 Another, with the prefix "Dutch," was "Charley" — surname, 

 as usual, unknown — who owned a claim in Kansas, but who 

 joined us when we were short of men when passing his farm. 

 In some of our troublous times, and we had plenty of them, he 

 would doubly curse the day he joined us, and cry like a 

 Banshee for the wife and baby he had left on the shore of 

 the Big Blue. He was a freethinker and argumentator, and 

 when in the mood, he would make the air ring with his 

 excited talk. As he was barely understandable in his calm 

 moments, he spoke no English when excited. Then there 

 was "Whisky Bill," so termed for his fondness for the 

 adjective ; there was Bentley, a deserter from the regulars, 

 who hid or disguised himself when near a fort or when near- 

 ing a camp of soldiers. Another was " Dutch Joe," formerly a 

 Mississippi steamboatman, in which calling he had learned 

 any amount of profanity and irreligion, and yet at night, 

 around our campfires, he would unctiously sing pathetic 

 songs, the stock specimen being, " When My Old Mother and 

 I Did Part," which, full of good sentiment, got to be as 

 wearisome a song as "The Child in the Grave With Its 



