“I am going to buy a mustang and a hunting outfit and go out on the plains.”
“What is your idea of starting from St. Louis?”
“Why, don’t all the hunters and trappers fit out there? I understand that it is the headquarters of the fur trade.”
“It used to be; but it is a smashing big city now, and the hunters fit out at other points. Why don’t you go to Denver? That is hundreds of miles farther on. You see that western country is settling up rapidly, and if you want to find fur-bearing animals you must go to the mountains.”
Bob looked down at the floor in a brown study. He began to see, now, that he had made some mistakes in his calculations. He supposed that all he had to do to enter upon the life of a trapper was, to provide himself with a horse and rifle at St. Louis, and plunge at once into the wilderness, where he would find all sorts of game, from a mink to a grizzly bear. He was not very well posted in geography and history, for, while he was at school, he made it a point to neglect his books as much as he could; but he had gained an idea from some of the dime novels: he had read that St. Louis was a little hamlet—a fort, with a few log cabins clustered about it—and that, when he arrived there, he would find himself on the borders of civilization, and surrounded by Indians and trappers.
“What makes you select that mean business, anyhow?” asked George. “Do you know anything about it?”
“O, yes! I have had a good deal of experience in hunting.”
“Did you ever make any money at it?”
“I never tried.”
“And you never will, no matter how hard you try. You’ll go hungry half the time and ragged and dirty all the time. If you go alone you will be certain to fall in with some rough characters who will steal everything you’ve got and leave you stranded in the wilderness. Then what would you do? You don’t know the country, and suppose you should lose your way and get snowed up? That would be the last of you. I have seen lots of hunters, and I know just what sort of men they are and what sort of lives they lead.”