in Bonneville and he's told me how he stood
on the top of Scotts Bluffs and seen the country black with
'em--millions of 'em. That's twenty-five years ago and he ain't seen
no more than I have on these plains not two seasons back. Out as far
as your eye could reach, crawlin' with buffalo, till you couldn't see
cow nor bull, but just a black mass of 'em, solid to the horizon."

David felt abashed and the doctor came to his rescue with a question
about Captain Bonneville and Joe forgot his scorn of foolish young men
in reminiscences of that hardy pathfinder.

The old trapper seemed to have known everyone of note in the history of
the plains and the fur trade, or if he didn't know them he said he did
which was just as good. Lying on a buffalo skin, the firelight gilding
the bony ridges of his face, a stub of black pipe gripped between his
broken teeth, he told stories of the men who had found civilization too
cramped and taken to the wilderness. Some had lived and died there,
others come back, old and broken, to rest in a corner of the towns they
had known as frontier settlements. Here they could look out to the
West they loved, strain their dim eyes over the prairie, where the
farmer's plow was tracing its furrow, to the Medicine Way of The Pale
Face that led across the plains and up the long bright river and over
the mountains to the place of the trapper's rendezvous.

He had known Jim Beckwourth, the mulatto who was chief of the Crows,
fought their battles and lived in their villages with a Crow wife. Joe
described him as "a powerful liar," but a man without fear. Under his
leadership the Crows had become a great nation and the frontiersmen
laid it to his door that no Crow had ever attacked a white man except
in self-defense. Some said he was still living in California. Joe
remembered him well--a tall man, strong and fleet-footed as an Indian,
with mighty muscles and a skin like bronze. He always wore round his
neck a charm of a perforated bullet set between two glass beads hanging
from a thread of sinew.

He had known Rose, another white chief of the Crows, an educated man
who kept his past secret and of whom it was said that the lonely places
and the Indian trails were safer for him than the populous ways of
towns. The old man had been one of the garrison in Fort Union when the
terrible Alexander Harvey had killed Isidore, the Mexican, and standing
in the courtyard cried to the assembled men: "I, Alexand