country.

The men at the trading post saw the Missouri wagons pull out ahead. Two
hours later the Wingate train followed, as the lot had determined.
Woodhull remained with his friends in the Wingate group, regarded now
with an increasing indifference, but biding his time.

Bridger held back his old friend Jackson even after the last train
pulled out. It was mid afternoon when the start was made.

"Don't go just yet, Bill," said he. "Ride on an' overtake 'em. Nothin'
but rattlers an' jack rabbits now fer a while. The Shoshones won't hurt
'em none. I'm powerful lonesome, somehow. Let's you an' me have one more
drink."

"That sounds reas'nble," said Jackson. "Shore that sounds reas'nble to
me."

They drank of a keg which the master of the post had hidden in his
lodge, back of his blankets; drank again of high wines diluted but
uncolored--the "likker" of the fur trade.

They drank from tin cups, until Bridger began to chant, a deepening
sense of his old melancholy on him.

"Good-by!" he said again and again, waving his hand in general vagueness
to the mountains.

"We was friends, wasn't we, Bill?" he demanded again and again; and
Jackson, drunk as he, nodded in like maudlin gravity. He himself began
to chant. The two were savages again.

"Well, we got to part, Bill. This is Jim Bridger's last Rendyvous. I've
rid around an' said good-by to the mountings. Why don't we do it the way
the big partisans allus done when the Rendyvous was over? 'Twas old Mike
Fink an' his friend Carpenter begun hit, fifty year ago. Keel-boat men
on the river, they was. There's as good shots left to-day as then, an'
as good friends. You an' me has seed hit; we seed hit at the very last
meetin' o' the Rocky Mountain Company men, before the families come. An
'nary a man spilled the whiskey on his partner's head."

"That's the truth," assented Jackson. "Though some I wouldn't trust
now."

"Would ye trust me, Bill, like I do you, fer sake o' the old times, when
friends was friends?"

"Shore I would, no matter how come, Jim. My hand's stiddy as a rock,
even though my shootin' shoulder's a leetle stiff from that Crow arrer."

Each man held out his firing arm, steady as a bar.

"I kin still see the nail heads on the door, yan. Kin ye, Bill?"

"Plain! It's a waste o' likker, Jim, fer we'd both drill the cups."

"Are ye a-skeered?"

"I told ye not."

"Chardon!" roared Bridger to his clerk. "You, Chardon, come here!"

The clerk obeyed