He had known Jim Beckwourth, the mulatto who was chief of the Crows, fought their battles and lived in their villages with a Crow wife. Joe described him as "a powerful liar," but a man without fear. Under his leadership the Crows had become a great nation and the frontiersmen laid it to his door that no Crow had ever attacked a white man except in self-defense. Some said he was still living in California. Joe remembered him well - a tall man, strong and fleet-footed as an Indian, with mighty muscles and a skin like bronze. He always wore round his neck a charm of a perforated bullet set between two glass beads hanging from a thread of sinew.

He had known Rose, another white chief of the Crows, an educated man who kept his past secret and of whom it was said that the lonely places and the Indian trails were safer for him than the populous ways of towns. The old man had been one of the garrison in Fort Union when the terrible Alexander Harvey had killed Isidore, the Mexican, and standing in the courtyard cried to the assembled men: "I, Alexander Harvey, have killed the Spaniard. If there are any of his friends who want to take it up let them come on"; and not a man in the fort dared to go. He had been with Jim Bridger, when, on a wager, he went down Bear River in a skin boat and came out on the waters of the Great Salt Lake.

Susan, who had stopped her talk with the voyageur to listen to this minstrel of the plains, now said:

"Aren't you lonely in those quiet places where there's no one else?"

The old man nodded, a gravely assenting eye on hers:

"Powerful lonely, sometimes. There ain't a mountain man that ain't felt it, some of 'em often, others of 'em once and so scairt that time they won't take the risk again. It comes down suddint, like a darkness - then everything round that was so good and fine, the sound of the pines and the bubble of the spring and the wind blowing over the grass, seems like they'd set you crazy. You'd give a year's peltries for the sound of a man's voice. Just like when some one's dead that you set a heap on and you feel you'd give most everything you got to see 'em again for a minute. There ain't nothin' you wouldn't promise if by doin' it you could hear a feller hail you - just one shout - as he comes ridin' up the trail."

"That was how Jim Cockrell felt when he prayed for the dog," said the tall man.

"Did he get the dog?"

He nodded.

"That's what he said anyway. He was took with just such a lonesome spell once when he was trapping in the Mandans country. He was a pious critter, great on prayer and communing with the Lord. And he felt - I've heard him tell about it - just as if he'd go wild if he didn't get something for company. What he wanted was a dog and you might just as well want an angel out there with nothin' but the Indian villages breakin' the dazzle of the snow and you as far away from them as you could get. But that didn't stop Jim. He just got down and prayed, and then he waited and prayed some more and 'ud look around for the dog, as certain he'd come as that the sun 'ud set. Bimeby he fell asleep and when he woke there was the dog, a little brown varmint, curled up beside him on the blanket. Jim used to say an angel brought it. I'm not contradictin', but - "