Fair as a garden to the sun-seared eyes of the emigrants seemed the mountain post, Fort Bridger, when its rude stockade separated itself from the distortions of the desert mirage, whose citadels of silence, painted temples fronted with colossal columns, giant sphinxes, vast caryatids, lofty arches, fretwork facades, fantastically splendid castles and palaces now resolved themselves into groups of squat pole structures and a rude stock corral.

The site of the post itself could not better have been chosen.  Here the flattened and dividing waters of the Black’s Fork, icy cold and fresh from the Uintah Mountains to the southward, supported a substantial growth of trees, green now and wonderfully refreshing to desert-weary eyes.

“The families are coming!”

Bridger’s clerk, Chardon, raised the new cry of the trading post.

“Broke an’ hungry, I’ll bet!” swore old Jim Bridger in his beard.

But he retired into his tepee and issued orders to his Shoshone squaw, who was young and pretty.  Her name, as he once had said, was Dang Yore Eyes—­and she was very proud of it.  Philosophical withal, though smarting under recent blows of her white lord, she now none the less went out and erected once more in front of the tepee the token Bridger had kicked down—­the tufted lance, the hair-fringed bull-neck shield, the sacred medicine bundle which had stood in front of Jeem’s tepee in the Rendezvous on Horse Creek, what time he had won her in a game of hands.  Whereupon the older squaw, not young, pretty or jealous, abused him in Ute and went out after wood.  Her name was Blast Your Hide, and she also was very proud of her white name.  Whereafter both Dang Yore Eyes and Blast Yore Hide, female, and hence knowing the moods of man, wisely hid out for a while.  They knew when Jeem had the long talk with the sick white squaw, who was young, but probably needed bitter bark of the cottonwood to cure her fever.

Painted Utes and Shoshones stood about, no more silent than the few local mountaineers, bearded, beaded and fringed, who still after some mysterious fashion clung to the old life at the post.  Against the newcomers, profitable as they were, still existed the ancient antipathy of the resident for the nonresident.

“My land sakes alive!” commented stoical Molly Wingate after they had made some inquiries into the costs of staples here.  “This store ain’t no place to trade.  They want fifty dollars a sack for flour—­what do you think of that?  We got it for two dollars back home.  And sugar a dollar a tin cup, and just plain salt two bits a pound, and them to guess at the pound.  Do they think we’re Indians, or what?”

“It’s the tenth day of August, and a thousand miles ahead,” commented Caleb Price.  “And we’re beyond the buffalo now.”

“And Sis is in trouble,” added Jed Wingate.  “The light wagon’s got one hind spindle half in two, and I’ve spliced the hind ex for the last time.”