The next morning he looked me up and told me he wanted to make a proposition to me.
"What is it ?" I asked.

I had thought I was the one who was going to make a proposition.
"I will give you one-eighth of this town site," he said.
The nerve of this proposal took me off my feet.

Here was a total stranger offering me one-eighth of my own town site as a reward for what I had done for him.
I told him that if he killed another buffalo I would have to hog-hobble him and send him out of town; then rode off and left him.
This magnanimous offer occurred right in front of my own house.

My wife overheard it, and also my reply.
As I rode away, he called out that he wanted to explain, but I was thoroughly disgusted.
"I have no time to listen to you," I shouted over my shoulder.
I was bound out on a buffalo hunt to get meat for the graders twenty miles away on the railroad, and I kept right on going.

Three days afterward I rode back over the ridge above the town of Rome and looked down on it.
I took several more looks.