the
spell of the frontier had caught me. In spite of sadness, trouble,
doubt, I would now only with reluctance have resigned my advance into
that country which offered to all men, young and old, a zest of deeds
bold enough to banish sadness, doubt and grief.

CHAPTER XII

THE WRECK ON THE RIVER

I made friends with many of these strange travelers, and was attracted
especially by one, a reticent man of perhaps sixty odd years, in Western
garb, full of beard and with long hair reaching to his shoulders. He had
the face of an old Teuton war chief I had once seen depicted in a canvas
showing a raid in some European forest in years long before a Christian
civilization was known--a face fierce and eager, aquiline in nose, blue
of eye; a figure stalwart, muscular, whose every movement spoke courage
and self-confidence. Auberry was his name, and as I talked with him he
told me of days passed with my heroes--Fremont, Carson, Ashley, Bill
Williams, Jim Bridger, even the negro ruffian Beckwourth--all men of the
border of whose deeds I had read. Auberry had trapped from the St.
Mary's to the sources of the Red, and his tales, told in simple and
matter-of-fact terms, set my very blood atingle. He was bound, as he
informed me, for Laramie; always provided that the Sioux, now grown
exceedingly restless over the many wagon-trains pushing up the Platte to
all the swiftly-opening West, had not by this time swooped down and
closed all the trails entirely. I wished nothing then so much as that
occasion might permit me to join him in a journey across the Plains.

Among all these west-bound travelers the savage and the half-civilized
seemed to me to preponderate; this not to say that they were so much
coarse and crude as they were fierce, absorbed, self-centered. Each man
depended upon himself and needed to do so. The crew on the decks were
relics from keel-boat days, surly and ugly of temper. The captain was an
ex-pilot of the lower river, taciturn and surly of disposition. Our
pilot had been drunk for a week at the levee of St. Louis and I misdoubt
that all snags and sandbars looked alike to him.

Among the skin-clad trappers, hunters and long-haired plainsmen, I saw
but one woman, and she certainly was fit to bear them company. I should
say that she was at least sixty years of age, and nearly six feet in
height, thin, angular, wrinkled and sinewy. She wore a sunbonnet of
enormous projection, dipped snuff vigorously each few m