ped first to pick it up. As he rose he saw
Carson's face change as he held out his hand.

"What's this stone, Kit--yer medicine?"

But Bridger's own face altered suddenly as he now guessed the truth. He
looked about him suddenly, his mouth tight. Kit Carson rose and they
passed from the room.

"Only one thing heavy as that, Mister Kit!" said Bridger fiercely.
"Where'd you git hit? My gran'pap had some o' that. Hit come from North
Carliny years ago. I know what hit is--hit's gold! Kit Carson, damn ye,
hit's the gold!"

"Shut your mouth, you fool!" said Carson. "Yes, it's gold. But do you
want me to be a liar to my General? That's part of my dispatches."

"Hit" come from Californy?"

"Curse me, yes, California! I was ordered to get the news to the Army
first. You're loose-tongued, Jim. Can you keep this?"

"Like a grave, Kit."

"Then here!"

Carson felt inside his shirt and pulled out a meager and ill-printed
sheet which told the most epochal news that this or any country has
known--the midwinter discovery of gold at Sutter's Mills.

A flag was flying over Laramie stockade, and this flag the mountain men
saw fit to salute with many libations, hearing now that it was to fly
forever over California as over Oregon. Crowding the stockade inclosure
full was a motley throng--border men in buckskins, _engages_ swart as
Indians, French breeds, full-blood Cheyennes and Sioux of the northern
hills, all mingling with the curious emigrants who had come in from the
wagon camps. Plump Indian girls, many of them very comely, some of them
wives of the trappers who still hung about Laramie, ogled the newcomers,
laughing, giggling together as young women of any color do, their black
hair sleek with oil, their cheeks red with vermilion, their wrists heavy
with brass or copper or pinchbeck circlets, their small moccasined feet
peeping beneath gaudy calico given them by their white lords. Older
squaws, envious but perforce resigned, muttered as their own
stern-faced stolid red masters ordered them to keep close. Of the
full-bloods, whether Sioux or Cheyennes, only those drunk were other
than sullenly silent and resentful as they watched the white man's orgy
at Old Laramie on the Fourth of July of 1848.

Far flung along the pleasant valley lay a vast picture possible in no
other land or day. The scattered covered wagons, the bands of cattle and
horses, the white tents rising now in scores, the blue of many fires,
all proved that