the mail-bags, that
what his principal had actually secured from the Postmaster-General
was not a contract at all, but merely a chance to bid when the annual
offers for star routes came up for bidding the following May. It was a
body blow to the putative owner of a stage-line.

Long after the last of his Deadwood coaches had been rattled to
kindlings in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Packard told the last
chapter of his connection with the Medora and Black Hills Forwarding
and Transportation Company.

"No mail contract; hardly a month of earnings before winter, when
there was no chance of paying operating expenses; responsible for the
pay-roll, but not on it; with a private pay-roll and expenses equal to
or greater than my private income; with all my cash savings gone in
the preliminary expenses of putting on the line, and finally with no
chance, under my contract, of getting a cent from the stage-line
before that nebulous time when it had paid for itself. The Marquis
soon returned and I told him I could not consider myself bound by the
contract. The delay in providing funds I had condoned by staying with
the proposition, but a mail contract which was essential in helping to
pay expenses was not even a possibility for seven or more months in
the future. I stayed until another man was hired and left my duties
with a grunt of relief."[9]

[Footnote 9: It was Packard's stage-line which brought
Scipio le Moyne (in Owen Wister's novel) from the Black
Hills to Medora to become the substitute cook of the
Virginian's mutinous "outfit." The cook whom the
Virginian kicked off the train at Medora, because he was
too anxious to buy a bottle of whiskey, is said to have
been a man named Macdonald. He remained in the Bad Lands
as cook for one of the ranches, but he was such an
inveterate drinker that "Nitch" Kendley was forced to
take drastic measures. Finding him unconscious one day,
just outside of Medora, he tied him hand and foot to the
sagebrush. The cook struggled twelve hours in the
broiling sun before he could free himself. Tradition has
it that he did not touch another drop of liquor for
three years.]

For Packard the failure of his venture was not a serious matter. The
_Cowboy_ was flourishing and there was enoug