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,” said he, “the Arapahoes have just killed two of us in the mountains.  Old Bull-Tail has come to tell us.  They stabbed one behind his back, and shot the other with his own rifle.  That’s the way we live here!  I mean to give up trapping after this year.  My squaw says she wants a pacing horse and some red ribbons; I’ll make enough beaver to get them for her, and then I’m done!  I’ll go below and live on a farm.”

“Your bones will dry on the prairie, Rouleau!” said another trapper, who was standing by; a strong, brutal-looking fellow, with a face as surly as a bull-dog’s.

Rouleau only laughed, and began to hum a tune and shuffle a dance on his stumps of feet.

“You’ll see us, before long, passing up our way,” said the other man.  “Well,” said I, “stop and take a cup of coffee with us”; and as it was quite late in the afternoon, I prepared to leave the fort at once.