The old man took his pipe out of his mouth and shook his head.

"The times is dead," he said, with the regret of great days gone, softened by age which softens all things. "There ain't anything in it now. When Ashley and the Sublettes and Campbell ran the big companies it was a fine trade. The rivers was swarmin' with beaver and if the Indians 'ud let us alone every man of us 'ud come down to rendezvous with each mule carrying two hundred pound of skins. Them was the times."

The quick, laughing patter of the voyageur's French broke in on his voice, but old Joe, casting a dim eye back over the splendid past, was too preoccupied to mind.

"I've knowed the time when the Powder River country and the rivers that ran into Jackson's Hole was as thick with beaver as the buffalo range is now with buffalo. We'd follow up a new stream and where the ground was marshy we'd know the beaver was there, for they'd throw dams across till the water'd soak each side, squeezin' through the willow roots. Then we'd cut a tree and scoop out a canoe, and when the shadders began to stretch go nosin' along the bank, keen and cold and the sun settin' red and not a sound but the dip of the paddle. We'd set the traps - seven to a man - and at sun-up out again in the canoe, clear and still in the gray of the morning, and find a beaver in every trap."

"Nothin' but buffalo now to count on," said the other man. "And what's in that?"

David said timidly, as became so extravagant a suggestion, that a mountain man he had met in Independence told him he thought the buffalo would be eventually exterminated. The trappers looked at one another, and exchanged satiric smiles. Even the Canadian stopped in his chatter with Susan to exclaim in amaze: "Sacre Tonnerre!"

Old Joe gave a lazy cast of his eye at David.

"Why, boy," he said, "if they'd been killin' them varmints since Bunker Hill they couldn't do no more with 'em than you could with your little popgun out here on the plains. The Indians has druv 'em from the West and the white man's druv 'em from the East and it don't make no difference. I knowed Captain Bonneville and he's told me how he stood on the top of Scotts Bluffs and seen the country black with 'em - millions of 'em. That's twenty-five years ago and he ain't seen no more than I have on these plains not two seasons back. Out as far as your eye could reach, crawlin' with buffalo, till you couldn't see cow nor bull, but just a black mass of 'em, solid to the horizon."

David felt abashed and the doctor came to his rescue with a question about Captain Bonneville and Joe forgot his scorn of foolish young men in reminiscences of that hardy pathfinder.

The old trapper seemed to have known everyone of note in the history of the plains and the fur trade, or if he didn't know them he said he did which was just as good. Lying on a buffalo skin, the firelight gilding the bony ridges of his face, a stub of black pipe gripped between his broken teeth, he told stories of the men who had found civilization too cramped and taken to the wilderness. Some had lived and died there, others come back, old and broken, to rest in a corner of the towns they had known as frontier settlements. Here they could look out to the West they loved, strain their dim eyes over the prairie, where the farmer's plow was tracing its furrow, to the Medicine Way of The Pale Face that led across the plains and up the long bright river and over the mountains to the place of the trapper's rendezvous.