“That sounds reas’nable,” said Jackson. “Shore that sounds reas’nable to me.”
They drank of a keg which the master of the post had hidden in his lodge, back of his blankets; drank again of high wines diluted but uncolored—the “likker” of the fur trade.
They drank from tin cups, until Bridger began to chant, a deepening sense of his old melancholy on him.
“Good-by!” he said again and again, waving his hand in general vagueness to the mountains.
“We was friends, wasn’t we, Bill?” he demanded again and again; and Jackson, drunk as he, nodded in like maudlin gravity. He himself began to chant. The two were savages again.
“Well, we got to part, Bill. This is Jim Bridger’s last rendyvous. I’ve rid around an’ said good-by to the mountings. Why don’t we do it the way the big partisans allus done when the rendyvous was over? ’Twas old Mike Fink an’ his friend Carpenter begun hit fifty year ago. Keel-boat men on the river, they was. There’s as good shots left to-day as then, and as good friends. You an’ me has seed hit; we seed hit at the very last meetin’ o’ the Rocky Mountain Company men, before the families come. An’ nary a man spilled the whisky on his partner’s head.”
“That’s the truth,” assented Jackson, “though some I wouldn’t trust now.”
“Would ye trust me, Bill, like I do you, fer sake o’ the old times, when friends was friends?”
“Shore I would, no matter how come, Jim. My hand’s stiddy as a rock, even though my shootin’ shoulder’s a leetle stiff from that Crow arrer.”
Each man held out his firing arm, steady as a bar.