Oliver looked, and noted a little knot of towns-people—mainly Mexicans, shoulders and heads shrouded in serapes or native blankets—standing before the Bent, St. Vrain & Co. local warehouse and gazing at the doorway. So across the plaza he trudged.
The knot was scrutinizing, without much comment, two Indians who leaned, stolid and unaffected and haughty, against the doorway posts. They were Indians of lighter coppery complexion than the Kiowas or the Apaches or the Utes; they were as light as a Cheyenne, and one had a scraggly moustache of black hairs. By this, and by the beading of their shirts and the shape of their moccasins, Oliver (a mountain-man) knew them to be Indians of a strange tribe. A voice at his elbow interrupted his examination.
“Those are Delawares, boy.” It was Bill Williams who spoke—Bill Williams, sometimes called “Preacher” Williams; not a Carson man, but an odd old trapper who from his lone trail occasionally appeared in Taos. “Eastern Injuns they be, who war moved by the government into the Injun country ’long the Missouri frontier. Big hunters an’ fighters, but don’t often get to the mountains.”
“Are they the express from Kit?”
“They are the runners from Kit. Sent ’em from the mouth o’ the Kaw, or Kansas Landing ’bove Independence. Understand they came through, the seven hundred miles, in ’leven days, which is good travel.”
So it was; and evidently, therefore, the message from Carson for his men to meet him at Fort Laramie was urgent. And little time could be spent preparing; none could be wasted; for as everybody knew, Fort Laramie was four hundred miles from Bent’s Fort, and Bent’s Fort was two hundred and fifty miles from Taos.
Now must the Kit Carson men at Taos fall to, making ready. Bullets must be moulded, powder-horns replenished, repairs put upon saddle and shirt and leggins, new moccasins found or the old ones soled again. Nobody might tell whither this next trail led, nor how long ere it would turn home; and few cared, even though they had just come in from another trail of three months.
Two men were sent back to the summer camp to tell the Sol Silver party what had happened; three were assigned to see the bales of pelts through to market at St. Louis; and before noon of the following day the rest, fifteen of them, under Lieutenant Ike, with plenty of horses and mules for saddle and pack, clattered out of Taos, bound straight for Fort Laramie, more than six hundred miles away.
Riding northward, on the sixth day the hurrying squad emerged in sight of Bent’s Fort, above whose brown, high walls flew the Stars and Stripes: a token and a challenge, planted here on the farthest border where the United States met Mexico.
Fording the Arkansas, in this the southeastern part of present Colorado, the Carson men were in American territory. Swarthy William Bent, proprietor, who lived at the fort, and whose wife was a Cheyenne woman, welcomed them into the broad gateway.