“Let me see one o’ them damned things!” he was exclaiming.  “That’s why I left home fifty year ago.  Pap wanted to make me plow!  I ain’t seed one since, but I’ll bet a pony I kin run her right now!  Go git yer plow things, boys, an’ fotch on ary sort of cow critter suits ye, I’ll bet I kin hook ’em up an’ plow with ’em, too, right yere!”

The old gray man at the gate sat and twisted his long curls.

The sweet wind of the foothills blew aslant the smokes of a thousand fires.  Over the vast landscape passed many moving figures.  Young Indian men, mostly Sioux, some Cheyennes, a few Gros Ventres of the Prairie, all peaceable under the tacit truce of the trading post, rode out from their villages to their pony herds.  From the post came the occasional note of an inharmonic drum, struck without rhythm by a hand gone lax.  The singers no longer knew they sang.  The border feast had lasted long.  Keg after keg had been broached.  The Indian drums were going.  Came the sound of monotonous chants, broken with staccato yells as the border dance, two races still mingling, went on with aboriginal excesses on either side.  On the slopes as dusk came twinkled countless tepee fires.  Dogs barked mournfully a-distant.  The heavy half roar of the buffalo wolves, superciliously confident, echoed from the broken country.

Now and again a tall Indian, naked save where he clutched his robe to him unconsciously, came staggering to his tepee, his face distorted, yelling obscene words and not knowing what he said.  Patient, his youngest squaw stood by his tepee, his spear held aloft to mark his door plate, waiting for her lord to come.  Wolfish dogs lay along the tepee edges, noses in tails, eyeing the master cautiously.  A grumbling old woman mended the fire at her own side of the room, nearest the door, spreading smooth robes where the man’s medicine hung at the willow tripod, his slatted lazyback near by.  In due time all would know whether at the game of “hands,” while the feast went on, the little elusive bone had won or lost for him.  Perhaps he had lost his horses, his robes, his weapons—­his squaws.  The white man’s medicine was strong, and there was much of it on his feasting day.

From the stockade a band of mounted Indians, brave in new finery, decked with eagle bonnets and gaudy in beaded shirts and leggings, rode out into the slopes, chanting maudlin songs.  They were led by the most beautiful young woman of the tribe, carrying a wand topped by a gilded ball, and ornamented with bells, feathers, natural flowers.  As the wild pageant passed the proud savages paid no attention to the white men.

The old gray man at the gate sat and twisted his long curls.

And none of them knew the news from California.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE FIRST GOLD

The purple mantle of the mountain twilight was dropping on the hills when Bridger and Carson rode out together from the Laramie stockade to the Wingate encampment in the valley.  The extraordinary capacity of Bridger in matters alcoholic left him still in fair possession of his faculties; but some new purpose, born of the exaltation of alcohol, now; held his mind.