CHAPTER XXV

OLD LARAMIE

An old gray man in buckskins sat on the ground in the shade of the adobe stockade at old Fort Laramie, his knees high in front of him, his eyes fixed on the ground.  His hair fell over his shoulders in long curls which had once been brown.  His pointed beard fell on his breast.  He sat silent and motionless, save that constantly he twisted a curl around a forefinger, over and over again.  It was his way.  He was a long-hair, a man of another day.  He had seen the world change in six short years, since the first wagon crossed yonder ridges, where now showed yet one more wagon train approaching.

He paid no attention to the debris and discard of this new day which lay all about him as he sat and dreamed of the days of trap and packet.  Near at hand were pieces of furniture leaning against the walls, not bought or sold, but abandoned as useless here at Laramie.  Wagon wheels, tireless, their fellies falling apart, lay on the ground, and other ruins of great wagons, dried and disjointed now.

Dust lay on the ground.  The grass near by was all cropped short.  Far off, a village of the Cheyennes, come to trade, and sullen over the fact that little now could be had for robes or peltries, grazed their ponies aside from the white man’s road.  Six hundred lodges of the Sioux were on the tributary river a few miles distant.  The old West was making a last gallant stand at Laramie.

Inside the gate a mob of white men, some silent and businesslike, many drunken and boisterous, pushed here and there for access to the trading shelves, long since almost bare of goods.  Six thousand emigrants passed that year.

It was the Fourth of July in Old Laramie, and men in jeans and wool and buckskin were celebrating.  Old Laramie had seen life—­all of life, since the fur days of La Ramee in 1821.  Having now superciliously sold out to these pilgrims, reserving only alcohol enough for its own consumption, Old Laramie was willing to let the world wag, and content to twiddle a man curl around a finger.

But yet another detachment of the great army following the hegira of the Mormons was now approaching Laramie.  In the warm sun of mid-morning, its worn wheels rattling, its cattle limping and with lolling tongues, this caravan forded and swung wide into corral below the crowded tepees of the sullen tribesmen.

[Illustration:  A Paramount Picture.

The Covered Wagon_.

JUST BEFORE THE START OF THE WAGON TRAIN.]

Ahead of it now dashed a horseman, swinging his rifle over his head and uttering Indian yells.  He pulled up at the very door of the old adobe guard tower with its mounted swivel guns; swung off, pushed on into the honeycomb of the inner structure.