When telling a story he invariably kept his pipe in his mouth, using his hands to cut from a solid plug of Missouri tobacco, whenever his pipe showed signs of exhaustion.  He also fixed his eyes on some imaginary object in the blaze of the fire, and his countenance indicated a concentration of thought, as if to call back from the shadowy past the coming tale, the more attractive, perhaps, by its extreme improbability.

He declared that he once visited the realms of Pluto, and no one ever succeeded in disabusing his mind of the illusion.

The story is here presented just as he used to tell it, but divested of much of its dialect, so hard to read, and much more difficult to write:—­

“Well!” beginning with a vigorous pull at his pipe.  “I had been down to Bent’s Fort to get some powder, lead, and a few things I needed at the beginning of the buffalo season.  I remained there for some time waiting for a caravan to come from the States which was to bring the goods I wanted.  Things was wonderfully high; it took a beaver-skin for a plug of tobacco, three for a cup of powder, and other knick-knacks in proportion.  Jim Finch, an old trapper that went under by the Utes near the Sangre de Cristo Pass, a few years ago, had told me there was lots of beaver on the Purgatoire.  Nobody knowed it; all thought the creeks had been cleaned out of the varmints.  So down I goes to the canyon, and sot my traps.  I was all alone by myself, and I’ll be darned if ten Injuns didn’t come a screeching right after me.  I cached.  I did, and the darned red devils made for the open prairie with my animals.  I tell you, I was mad, but I kept hid for more than an hour.  Suddenly I heard a tramping in the bushes, and in breaks my little gray mule.  Thinks I them ’Rapahoes ain’t smart; so tied her to grass.  But the Injuns had scared the beaver so, I stays in my camp, eating my lariat.  Then I begun to get kind o’ wolfish and squeamish; something was gnawing and pulling at my inwards, like a wolf in a trap.  Just then an idea struck me, that I had been there before trading liquor with the Utes.

“I looked around for sign, and hurrah for the mountains if I didn’t find the cache!  And now if I didn’t kiss the rock that I had pecked with my butcher-knife to mark the place, I’m ungrateful.  Maybe the gravel wasn’t scratched up from that place, and to me as would have given all my traps for some Taos lightning, just rolled in the delicious fluid.[69]

“I was weaker than a goat in the spring, but when the Taos was opened, I fell back and let it run in.  In four swallows I concluded to pull up stakes for the headwaters of the Purgatoire for meat.  So I roped old Blue, tied on my traps, and left.

“It used to be the best place in the mountains for meat, but nothing was in sight.  Things looked mighty strange, and I wanted to make the back track; but, says I, here I am, and I don’t turn, surely.