&c. &c. &c.
and polishes off the high notes with a whoop which makes the old wooden houses shake again, as it rattles and echoes down the street.
Here, over fiery “monaghahela,” Jean Batiste, the sallow half-breed voyageur from the north—and who, deserting the service of the “North West” (the Hudson's Bay Company), has come down the Mississippi, from the “Falls,” to try the sweets and liberty of “free” trapping—hobnobs with a stalwart leather-clad “boy,” just returned from trapping on the waters of Grand River, on the western side the mountains, who interlards his mountain jargon with Spanish words picked up in Taos and California. In one corner a trapper, lean and gaunt from the starving regions of the Yellow Stone, has just recognised an old companyero, with whom he hunted years before in the perilous country of the Blackfeet.
“Why, John, old hos, how do you come on?”
“What! Meek, old 'coon! I thought you were under?”
One from Arkansa stalks into the centre of the room, with a pack of cards in his hand, and a handful of dollars in his hat. Squatting cross-legged on a buffalo robe, he smacks down the money, and cries out—“Ho, boys, hyar's a deck, and hyar's the beaver (rattling the coin), who dar set his hos? Wagh!”
Tough are the yarns of wondrous hunts and Indian perils, of hairbreadth 'scapes and curious “fixes.” Transcendant are the qualities of sundry rifles, which call these hunters masters; “plum” is the “centre” each vaunted barrel shoots; sufficing for a hundred wigs is the “hair” each hunter has “lifted” from Indians' scalps; multitudinous the “coups” he has “struck.” As they drink so do they brag, first of their guns, their horses, and their squaws, and lastly of themselves:—and when it comes to that, “ware steel.”
La Bonté, on his arrival at St Louis, found himself one day in no less a place than this; and here he made acquaintance with an old trapper about to start for the mountains in a few days, to hunt on the head waters of Platte and Green River. With this man he resolved to start, and, having still some hundred dollars in cash, he immediately set about equipping himself for the expedition. To effect this, he first of all visited the gun-store of Hawken, whose rifles are renowned in the mountains, and exchanged his own piece, which was of very small bore, for a regular mountain rifle. This was of very heavy metal, carrying about thirty-two balls to the pound, stocked to the muzzle, and mounted with brass, its only ornament being a buffalo bull, looking exceedingly ferocious, which was not very artistically engraved upon the trap in the stock. Here, too, he laid in a few pounds of powder and lead, and all the necessaries for a long hunt.
His next visit was to a smith's store, which smith was black by trade and black by nature, for he was a nigger, and, moreover, celebrated as being the best maker of beaver-traps in St Louis, and of him he purchased six new traps, paying for the same twenty dollars—procuring, at the same time, an old trap-sack, made of stout buffalo skin, in which to carry them.
We next find La Bonté and his companion—one Luke, better known as Grey-Eye, one of his eyes having been “gouged” in a mountain fray—at Independence, a little town situated on the Missouri, several hundred miles above St Louis, and within a short distance of the Indian frontier.