Preliminaries arranged, the combatants took up their respective positions at either end of a space marked for the purpose, at forty paces from each other. They were both armed with heavy rifles, and had the usual hunting-pouches, containing ammunition, hanging over the shoulder. Standing with the butts of their rifles on the ground, they confronted each other, and the crowd drawing away a few paces only on each side, left one man to give the word. This was the single word "fire;" and after this signal was given, the combatants were at liberty to fire away until one or the other dropped.
At the word both the men quickly raised their rifles to the shoulder, and as the sharp cracks rung instantaneously, they were seen to flinch, as either felt the pinging sensation of a bullet entering his flesh. Regarding each other steadily for a few moments, the blood running down La Bonté's neck from a wound under the left jaw, whilst his opponent was seen to place his hand once to his right breast, as if to feel the position of his wound, they commenced reloading their rifles. As, however, Pete was in the act of forcing down the ball with his long hickory wiping-stick, he suddenly dropped his right arm,—the rifle slipped from his grasp,—and, reeling for a moment like a drunken man,—he fell dead to the ground.
Even here, however, there was law of some kind or another, and the consequences of the duel were, that the constables were soon on the trail of La Bonté to arrest him. He, however, easily avoided them, and taking to the woods, lived for several days in as wild a state as the beasts he hunted and killed for his support.
Tired of this, however, he resolved to quit the country, and betake himself to the mountains, for which life he had ever felt an inclination.
When, therefore, he thought the officers of justice had tired of seeking him, and the coast was comparatively clear, he determined to start on his distant expedition to the Far West.
Once more, before he carried his project into execution, he sought and had a last interview with Mary Brand.
"Mary," said he, "I'm about to break. They're hunting me like a fall buck, and I'm bound to quit. Don't think any more about me, for I shall never come back." Poor Mary burst into tears, and bent her head on the table near which she was sitting. When again she raised it, she saw La Bonté, with his long rifle on his shoulder, striding with rapid steps from the house; and year after year rolled on, and he never returned.
A few days after this he found himself at St Louis, the emporium of the fur trade, and the fast rising metropolis of the precocious settlements of the west. Here, a prey to the agony of mind which jealousy, remorse, and blighted love mix into a very puchero of misery, La Bonté got into the company of certain "rowdies," a class which every western city particularly abounds in; and anxious to drown his sorrows in any way, and quite unscrupulous as to the means, he plunged into all the vicious excitements of drinking, gambling, and fighting, which form the every-day amusements of the rising generation of St Louis.
Perhaps in no other part of the United States, where indeed humanity is frequently to be seen in many curious and unusual phases, is there a population so marked in its general character, and at the same time divided into such distinct classes, as in the above-named city. Dating, as it does, its foundation from yesterday,—for what are thirty years in the growth of a metropolis?—its founders are now scarcely passed middle life, regarding with astonishment the growing works of their hands; and whilst gazing upon its busy quays, piled with grain and other produce of the west, its fleets of huge steamboats lying tier upon tier alongside the wharves, its well-stored warehouses and all the bustling concomitants of a great commercial depot, they can scarcely realise the memory of a few short years, when on the same spot nothing was to be seen but the few miserable hovels of a French village—the only sign of commerce the unwieldy bateaux of the Indian traders, laden with peltries from the distant regions of the Platte and Upper Missouri. Where now intelligent and wealthy merchants walk erect, in conscious substantiality of purse and credit, and direct the commerce of a vast and numerously-populated region, but the other day stalked, in dress of buckskin, the Indian trader of the west; and all the evidences of life, mayhap, consisted of the eccentric vagaries of the different bands of trappers and hardy mountaineers, who accompanied, some for pleasure and some as escort, the periodically arriving bateaux, laden with the beaver skins and buffalo robes collected during the season at the different trading posts in the Far West.
These, nevertheless, were the men whose hardy enterprise opened to commerce and the plough the vast and fertile regions of the West. Rough and savage though they were, they alone were the pioneers of that extraordinary tide of civilisation which has poured its resistless current through tracts large enough for kings to govern; over a country now teeming with cultivation, where, a few short years ago, countless herds of buffalo roamed unmolested, the bear and deer abounded, and where the savage Indian skulked through the woods and prairies, lord of the unappreciated soil which now yields its prolific treasures to the spade and plough of civilised man. To the wild and half-savage trapper, who may be said to exhibit the energy, enterprise, and hardihood characteristic of the American people, divested of all the false and vicious glare with which a high state of civilisation, too rapidly attained, has obscured their real and genuine character, in which the above traits are eminently prominent—to these men alone is due the empire of the West—destined in a few short years to become the most important of those confederate states which compose the mighty union of North America.