At this point the free trader paused to assemble the Missourian.  This iron-gray individual shook himself out, came forward, and gripped our hands, one after another.

The free trader would not allow us to make camp that night.  We were sentenced to sup and lodge with him, furnishing our own bedding, of course, but baking his bread.

The smell of cooking coffee and the odor of frying fish came to us from the kitchen, and floating over from somewhere the low, musical, well modulated voice of Cromwell, conversing in Cree, as he moved about among his mute and apparently inoffensive camp servants.

The day died hard.  The sun was still shining at 9 P.M.  At ten it was twilight, and in the dusk we sat listening to tales of the far North, totally unlike the tales we read in the story-books.  Smith the Silent, who was in charge of our party, was interested in the country, of course, its physical condition, its timber, its coal, and its mineral possibilities.  He asked about its mountains and streams, its possible and impossible passes; but the “Literary Cuss” and I were drinking deeply of weird stories that were being told quite incautiously by the free trader, the old factor, and by the Missourian.  We were like children, this young author and I, sitting for the first time in a theatre.  The flickering camp fire that we had kindled in the open served as a footlight, while the Gitch Lamp, still gleaming in the west, glanced through the trees and lit up the faces of the three great actors who were entertaining us without money and without price.  The Missourian was the star.  He had been reared in the lap of luxury, had run away from college where he had been installed by a rich uncle, his guardian, and jumped down to South America.  He had ridden with the Texas Rangers and with President Diaz’s Regulators, had served as a scout on the plains and worked with the Mounted Police, but was now “retired.”

All of which we learned not from him directly, but from the stories he told and from his bosom friend, the free trader, whose guests we were, and whose word, for the moment at least, we respected.

The camp fire burned down to a bed of coals, the Gitch Lamp went out.  In the west, now, there was only a glow of gold, but no man moved.

Smith the Pathfinder and our host the free trader bent over a map.  “But isn’t this map correct?” Smith would ask, and when in doubt Jim would call the Missourian.  “No,” said the latter, “you can’t float down that river because it flows the other way, and that range of mountains is two hundred miles out.”

Gradually we became aware that all this vast wilderness, to the world unknown, was an open book to this quiet man who had followed the buffalo from the Rio Grande to the Athabasca where he turned, made a last stand, and then went down.

When the rest had retired the free trader and I sat talking of the Last West, of the new trail my friends were blazing, and of the wonderfully interesting individual whom we called the Missourian.