ing themselves unable to drink the whole, they had sold the residue
to these Indians, and it needed no prophet to foretell the results; a
spark dropped into a powder magazine would not have produced a quicker
effect. Instantly the old jealousies and rivalries and smothered feuds
that exist in an Indian village broke out into furious quarrels. They
forgot the warlike enterprise that had already brought them three
hundred miles. They seemed like ungoverned children inflamed with the
fiercest passions of men. Several of them were stabbed in the drunken
tumult; and in the morning they scattered and moved back toward the
Missouri in small parties. I feared that, after all, the long-projected
meeting and the ceremonies that were to attend it might never take
place, and I should lose so admirable an opportunity of seeing the
Indian under his most fearful and characteristic aspect; however,
in foregoing this, I should avoid a very fair probability of being
plundered and stripped, and, it might be, stabbed or shot into the
bargain. Consoling myself with this reflection, I prepared to carry the
news, such as it was, to the camp.

I caught my horse, and to my vexation found he had lost a shoe and
broken his tender white hoof against the rocks. Horses are shod at Fort
Laramie at the moderate rate of three dollars a foot; so I tied
Hendrick to a beam in the corral, and summoned Roubidou, the blacksmith.
Roubidou, with the hoof between his knees, was at work with hammer and
file, and I was inspecting the process, when a strange voice addressed
me.

"Two more gone under! Well, there is more of us left yet. Here's Jean
Gars and me off to the mountains to-morrow. Our turn will come next, I
suppose. It's a hard life, anyhow!"

I looked up and saw a little man, not much more than five feet high, but
of very square and strong proportions. In appearance he was particularly
dingy; for his old buckskin frock was black and polished with time and
grease, and his belt, knife, pouch, and powder-horn appeared to have
seen the roughest service. The first joint of each foot was entirely
gone, having been frozen off several winters before, and his moccasins
were curtailed in proportion. His whole appearance and equipment bespoke
the "free trapper." He had a round ruddy face, animated with a spirit of
carelessness and gayety not at all in accordance with the words he had
just spoken.

"Two more gone," said I; "what do you mean by that?"

"Oh," s