m Laramie," to reassure the doctor and make
Leff put down his rifle.

The leader, a lean giant, bearded to the cheek bones and with lank
locks of hair falling from a coon-skin cap, gave his introduction
briefly. They were a party of trappers en route from Fort Laramie to
St. Louis with the winter's catch of skins. In skirted, leather
hunting shirt and leggings, knife and pistols in the belt and powder
horn, bullet mold, screw and awl hanging from a strap across his chest,
he was the typical "mountain man." While he made his greetings, with
as easy an assurance as though he had dropped in upon a party of
friends, his companions picketed the animals which moved on the
outskirts of the light in a spectral band of drooping forms.

The three other men, were an ancient trapper with a white froth of hair
framing a face, brown and wrinkled as a nut, a Mexican, Indian-dark,
who crouched in his serape, rolled a cigarette and then fell asleep,
and a French Canadian voyageur in a coat made of blanketing and with a
scarlet handkerchief tied smooth over his head. He had a round ruddy
face, and when he smiled, which he did all the time, his teeth gleamed
square and white from the curly blackness of his beard. He got out his
pans and buffalo meat, and was dropping pieces of hardtack into the
spitting tallow when Susan addressed him in his own tongue, the patois
of the province of Quebec. He gave a joyous child's laugh and a
rattling fire of French followed, and then he must pick out for her the
daintiest morsel and gallantly present it on a tin plate, wiped clean
on the grass.

They ate first and then smoked and over the pipes engaged in the
bartering which was part of the plainsman's business. The strangers
were short of tobacco and the doctor's party wanted buffalo skins.
Fresh meat and bacon changed hands. David threw in a measure of corn
meal and the old man--they called him Joe--bid for it with a hind
quarter of antelope. Then, business over, they talked of themselves,
their work, the season's catch, and the life far away across the
mountains where the beaver streams are.

They had come from the distant Northwest, threaded with ice-cold rivers
and where lakes, sunk between rocky bulwarks, mirrored the whitened
peaks. There the three Tetons raised their giant heads and the hollows
were spread with a grassy carpet that ran up the slopes like a
stretched green cloth. There had once been the trapper's paradise
where th