A tall, lean voyageur rushed by me to the center of the court and raised his outstretched hands to the sky. "My frien's," he cried, "dis ees mos' unjust! Dis ees one terrible calamitee! I call le bon Dieu to weetness dat eet is but two summer ago, een St. Louis, dat Pierre Chouteau, he say to me, 'Louis, you are ze bon cordelier! You are serve us mos' faithful dese many year! W'en de time come dat you can no longer pull eet de cordelle, de company, he shall give you a pension; een your hold hage you shall be mos' comfortable!'
"An' now, my frien's, ze great company, he ees dead! Ze pension pour le pauvre Louis, eet is not!" he went on in an increasingly frenzied shriek. "My frien's, I am hask you, w'at am I to do? I am fear ze Pieds Noirs; ze Gros Ventres; ze Assiniboins! I no can trap ze beav'! I no can hunt ze buf'! Eet ees zat I mus' die!"
He turned and with wild gestures fled from the court. His listeners slumped even more dejectedly into their lowly seats. I went on to my uncle's quarters and found two of the clerks, George Steell and Matthew Carroll, sitting with my uncle, and his wife, Tsistsaki,—true mother to me,—at his shoulder. I sat down upon my cot in a corner of the room and listened to their conversation and gathered that the Chouteaus had written to the three men, offering to sell them the fort and its contents upon most reasonable terms, and that my uncle had declined to enter into partnership with the two in purchasing the place and carrying on the business. At that, like poor Louis, the voyageur, I, too, was dismayed. "What, then, are we to do?" I asked myself.
The two visitors expressed great regret at my uncle's decision, said that they feared he would soon find that he had made a mistake, and went out. As soon as the door closed behind them, my uncle sprang from his seat, whirled Tsistsaki round three or four times, made a pass at me, and cried, "Well, my woman, well, Thomas, this is my great day! I am no longer under obligations to the company—there is no more company. I am free! Free to be what I have long wanted to be, an independent, lone Indian trader!"
Tsistsaki thoroughly understood English but never spoke it for fear that she would make a mistake and be laughed at. In her own language she cried, "Oh, my man! Do you mean that? Are we to leave this place and with my people follow the buffalo?"
"Something like that," he told her.
"O good! Good!" I all but shouted. "That means that I shall have no end of good times riding about and hunting with Pitamakan!"
He, you know, was my true-and-tried chum. Young though we were, we had experienced some wild adventures. We two had passed a winter in the depths of the Rockies; we had been to the shore of the Western Sea and back; and we had seen the great deserts and the strange peoples of the always-summer land. It was in my mind, now, that this sudden turn in the affairs of my uncle was to be the cause of more adventures for us. I could fairly scent them.
As to Tsistsaki, she went almost crazy with joy. "The gods are good to us!" she cried. "They have answered my prayers! Oh, how I have begged them, my man, to turn your steps to the wide plains and the mountains of our great hunting-ground! It is not good for us, you know, to live shut within these walls winter after winter and summer after summer, seeing no farther than the slopes and the cutbanks of this river bottom. To be well and happy we must do some roaming now and then and live as Old Man, our Maker, intended us to live, in airy buffalo-leather lodges, and close upon the breast of our mother [the earth]. Tell me, now, where we are going and when, so that I may have all our things packed."
"I cannot tell you that until I have talked with the chiefs. I am going now to counsel with them, for the steamboat starts back for St. Louis very early in the morning, and upon the decision of the chiefs depends the size of the trade-goods orders that I shall send down with the captain."