We were both still about half chilled to the bone, and Hays somehow stumbled around and found us enough dry wood to get a pretty good fire going. We didn’t want it so much for cooking breakfast as for making coffee and getting warm and drying out our damp clothes. After what I’d said the night before, about if we could make Bastrop by that night it would be our last night on the ground, Hays was all for mounting up and taking off without fooling around with anything. But I knew we were going to make good time on account of I’d decided to do something he didn’t know anything about. So I bade him just to bide his time and get himself comfortable and to fry up some bacon while I got the coffee going. We’d built a pretty good fire. Once the dry wood had worked itself up we’d been able to put on some of the wet wood, and it had caught and dried out while it was burning. As a consequence we had a fire that would warm a body through and through. But it burned down pretty quick, and I got out the coffeepot while Hays went to work on the bacon.
