Despite the rough joking, the march was an earnest one. No straggling was permitted, to shoot antelope or elk. Yet the day was not uneventful, for once a great brown-bearded man—his beard reaching almost to his belt—who was Solomon Silver, a Carson man, dropping back, rode beside the cavvy until, having good-naturedly eyed Oliver, he joined him, to query, perhaps as a joke:
“Wall, boy; what’d ye reckon to do if the Injuns come down sudden?”
“I’d fight ’em,” said Oliver, bravely. “Here’s my pistol. See?”
“Haw! Haw!” boomed Sol Silver the trapper, in a rousing laugh; and behind his beard he chuckled. “That’s right, boy. Let’s see that shooting-iron o’ yorn,” and he laid it in the palm of his scarred hand. “No use o’ Kit an’ us a-riding the trail, when this air riding it too. I’ll tell him. ’Spec’ if you shoot an Injun with this, son, an’ he gets to find out, he’d be powerful mad at ye! But thar, boy; do yore best. Hyar’s ’nother kind o’ pistol. Ever see one?” And he pulled it from his buffalo-hide belt.
“No,” confessed Oliver.
It was an odd-looking pistol, with long barrel and a round bulge between barrel and stock.
“That air a pistol to shoot six times without reloading,” declared Sol. “It has one barrel an’ six chambers, in this cylinder; the barrel stays put, but the cylinder turns ’round, with a fresh load ready, whenever trigger air pulled. Wagh! It air made by a man named Colt, in the States; it air called Colt, but it air a full-size hoss.”
“Have you all got them?” asked Oliver.
“All we Carson men have ’em, an’ percussion-cap rifles, to boot. When Kit Carson goes into a fight, he goes in to win, an’ the best weapons air none too good for his men. We air Carson men.” Sol proclaimed this with a certain degree of pride.