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Show 160 THE CALIFORNIA AND OREGON TRAIL. should learn that there were no buffalo there. I did not like this condition, for buffalo this season were rare in the neighborhood. There were also the two Minnicongew villages that I mentioned before; but about noon, an Indian came from Richard's Fort with the news that they were quarrelling, breaking up, and dispersing. So much for the whisky of the emigrants! Finding themselves unable to drink the whole, they had sold the residue to these Indians, and it needed no prophet to foretell the result; a spark dropt into a powder-magazine would not have produced a quicker effect. Instantly the old jealousies and rivalries and smothered feuds that exist in an Indian village broke out into furious quarrels. They forgot the warlike enterprise that had already brought them three hundred miles. They seemed like ungoverned children inflamed with the fiercest passions of men. Several of them were stabbed in the drunken tumult ; and in the morning they scattered and moved back toward the Missouri in small parties. I feared that, after all, the long-projected meeting and the ceremonies that were to attend it might never take place, and I should lose so admirable an opportunity of seeing the Indian under his most fearful and characteristic aspect; however in foregoing this, I should avoid a very fair probability of being plundered and stripped, and it might be, stabbed or shot into the bargain. Consoling myself with this reflection, I prepared to carry the news, such as it was, to the camp. I caught my horse, and to my vexation found he had lost a shoe and broken his tender white hoof against the rocks. Horses are shod at Fort Laramie at the moderate rate of three dollars a foot ; so I tied Hendrick to a beam in the corral, and summoned Roubidou, the blacksmith. Roubidou, with the THE WAR PARTIES. 161 hoof between his knees, was at work with hammer and file, and I was inspecting the process, when a strange voice ad. dressed me. 'Two more gone under! Well, there is more of us left yet. Here's Jean Gras and me off to the mountains to-morrow. Our turn will come next, I suppose. It's a hard life, any how!' I looked up and saw a little man, not much more than five feet high, but of very square and strong proportions. In appearance he was particularly dingy ; for his old buckskin frock was black and polished with time and grease, and his belt, knife, pouch and powder-horn appeared to have seen the roughest service. The first joint of each foot was entirely gone, having been frozen off several winters before, and his moccasons were curtailed in proportion. His whole appearance and equipment bespoke the ' free trapper.' He had a round ruddy face, animated with a spirit of carelessness and gayety not at all in accordance with the words he had just spoken. '"Two more aone "' said I · ' what do you mean by that?' b ' ' 'Oh,' said he, 'the Arapahoes have just killed two of us in the mountains. Old Bull-Tail has come to tell us. They stabbed one behind his back, and shot the other with his own rifle. That's the way we live here ! I mean to gi~e up trapping after this year. My squaw says she wants a pacing horse and some red ribbons : I'll make enough beaver to get them for her, and then I'm done ! I'll go below and live on a farm.' ' Your bones will dry on the prairie, Rouleau !' said another trapper, who was standing by ; a strong, brutal-looking fellow, with a face as surly as a bull-dog's. |