But they were startled, their apprehensions roused. They sat uneasy, and half an hour later the pad of horses' hoofs and approaching voices made each man grip his gun and leap to his feet. They sent a hail through the darkness and an answering voice came back:

"It's all right. Friends."

The figures that advanced into the firelight were those of four men with a shadowy train of pack mules extending behind them. In fringed and greasy buckskins, with long hair and swarthy faces, their feet noiseless in moccasins, they were so much of the wild, that it needed the words, "Trappers from Laramie," to reassure the doctor and make Leff put down his rifle.

The leader, a lean giant, bearded to the cheek bones and with lank locks of hair falling from a coon-skin cap, gave his introduction briefly. They were a party of trappers en route from Fort Laramie to St. Louis with the winter's catch of skins. In skirted, leather hunting shirt and leggings, knife and pistols in the belt and powder horn, bullet mold, screw and awl hanging from a strap across his chest, he was the typical "mountain man." While he made his greetings, with as easy an assurance as though he had dropped in upon a party of friends, his companions picketed the animals which moved on the outskirts of the light in a spectral band of drooping forms.

The three other men, were an ancient trapper with a white froth of hair framing a face, brown and wrinkled as a nut, a Mexican, Indian-dark, who crouched in his serape, rolled a cigarette and then fell asleep, and a French Canadian voyageur in a coat made of blanketing and with a scarlet handkerchief tied smooth over his head. He had a round ruddy face, and when he smiled, which he did all the time, his teeth gleamed square and white from the curly blackness of his beard. He got out his pans and buffalo meat, and was dropping pieces of hardtack into the spitting tallow when Susan addressed him in his own tongue, the patois of the province of Quebec. He gave a joyous child's laugh and a rattling fire of French followed, and then he must pick out for her the daintiest morsel and gallantly present it on a tin plate, wiped clean on the grass.

They ate first and then smoked and over the pipes engaged in the bartering which was part of the plainsman's business. The strangers were short of tobacco and the doctor's party wanted buffalo skins. Fresh meat and bacon changed hands. David threw in a measure of corn meal and the old man - they called him Joe - bid for it with a hind quarter of antelope. Then, business over, they talked of themselves, their work, the season's catch, and the life far away across the mountains where the beaver streams are.

They had come from the distant Northwest, threaded with ice-cold rivers and where lakes, sunk between rocky bulwarks, mirrored the whitened peaks. There the three Tetons raised their giant heads and the hollows were spread with a grassy carpet that ran up the slopes like a stretched green cloth. There had once been the trapper's paradise where the annual "rendezvous" was held and the men of the mountains gathered from creek and river and spent a year's earnings in a wild week. But the streams were almost empty now and the great days over. There was a market but no furs. Old Joe could tell what it had once been like, old Joe who years ago had been one of General Ashley's men.