But the wonderful Kit Carson, famous hunter and Indian fighter—was that really he? Of course, everybody on the Santa Fé Trail knew about Kit Carson, the free-trapper and captain of trappers, who as merely a boy had made such a name for himself in the mountains and who recently had come out of them, to live at Fernandez de Taos and to supply meat for Bent’s Fort, north. Ere leaving the Missouri frontier little Oliver had heard of Kit Carson as though he were ten feet tall and four feet wide, and bore a pine-tree for a club; but now little Oliver beheld an ordinary-looking person, not much taller than himself and not nearly so tall as many of the other trappers; with wiry body, bandy legs, flat features, and a voice so ridiculously low that his present conversation with Captain Blunt did not carry beyond the camp-fire light.
Murmured comment by teamsters, here and there among the wagons, showed to Oliver that he was not alone in his disappointment.
“That’s Kit Carson, is it?”
“That leetle feller, with the captain yon?”
“Wall, naow, I thought Kit Carson war some punkins!”
“A big Injun’s liable to pick him right up!”
“Whar’s his whiskers?”
But Dan Matthews, Captain Blunt’s first lieutenant, came hurrying, from point to point in the circle.
“Turn out your critters, men; and you guards post yourselves as before. Lively. There’s likely no danger to-night, Carson says; but keep your eyes and ears open, jest the same.”