“We crossed that swamp,” said Gaudylock, “with the canes rattling above our heads, and a panther screaming in a cypress tree, and we came to a village of the Chickasaws—­”

“In the night-time?”

“In the night-time, and a mockingbird singing like mad from a china tree, and the woods all level before us like a floor,—­no brush at all, just fine grass, with flowers in it like pinks in a garden.  So we smoked the peace pipe with the Chickasaws, and I hung a wampum belt with fine words, and we went on, the next day, walking over strawberries so thick that our moccasins were stained red.  At noon we overtook a party of boatmen from the Ohio,—­tall men they were, with beards, and dark and dirty as Indians,—­and we kept company with them through the country of the Chickasaws and the Choctaws until we came to a high bluff, and saw the Mississippi before us, brown and full and marked with drifting trees, and up the river the white houses of Natchez.  There we camped until we made out the flat-boat,—­General Wilkinson’s boat, all laden with tobacco and flour and bacon, and just a few Kentucks with muskets,—­that the Spaniards at Natchez had been fools enough to let pass!  We hailed that boat, and it came up beneath the cottonwoods, and I went aboard with the letters from Louisville, and on we went, down the river, past the great woods and the strange little towns, and the cotton-fields and the sugar-canes, and the moss hanging like banners from taller trees than this gum, to New Orleans.  And there the Intendant would have laid hands on our cargo and sent every mother’s son of us packing, but Miro, that was governor, stood our friend, being frightened indeed of what Kentucky might do if put to it!  And there, on the levee, we sold that tobacco and flour and bacon; and the tobacco which we sold at home for shillings and pence, we sold at New Orleans for joes and doubloons.  Ay, ay, and not one picayune of duty did we pay!  Ay, and we opened the Mississippi!”

The speaker paused to take from his pouch several leaves of tobacco, and to roll them deftly into a long cigar.  The boy rose to throw more wood upon the fire, then sat again at the trader’s feet, and with his chin in his hand stared into the glowing hollows.

“The West!” said Gaudylock, between slow puffs of smoke.  “Kentucky and the Ohio and the Mississippi, and then Louisiana and all that lies beyond, and Mexico and its gold!  Ha! the Mississippi open from its source—­and the Lord in Heaven knows where that may be—­to the last levee! and not a Spaniard to stop a pirogua, and right to trade in every port, and no lingo but plain English, and Mexico like a ripe apple,—­just a touch of the bough, and there’s the gold in hand!  If I were a dreamer, I would dream of the West.”

“Folk have always dreamed of the West,” said the boy.  “Sailors and kings, and men with their fortune to make.  I’ve read about Cortez and Pizarro,—­it would be fine to be like that!”