pening smiting the
drivers into lethargy. Propped against the roof supports, hats drawn
low over their brows they slept, the riders pacing on ahead stooped and
silent on their sweating horses. There was no sound but the creaking
of the wheels, and the low whisperings of the river into which, now and
then, an undermined length of sand dropped with a splash.

But in the evening life returned. When the dusk stole out of the hill
rifts and the river flowed thick gold from bank to bank, when the
bluffs grew black against the sunset fires, the little party shook off
its apathy and animation revived. Coolness came with the twilight,
sharpening into coldness as the West burned from scarlet and gold to a
clear rose. The fire, a mound of buffalo chips into which glowing
tunnels wormed, was good. Overcoats and blankets were shaken out and
the fragrance of tobacco was on the air. The recrudescence of ideas
and the need to interchange them came on the wanderers. Hemmed in by
Nature's immensity, unconsciously oppressed by it, they felt the want
of each other, of speech, of sympathy, and crouched about the fire
telling anecdotes of their life "back home," that sounded trivial but
drew them closer in the bond of a nostalgic wistfulness.

One night they heard a drum beat. It came out of the distance faint
but distinct, throbbing across the darkness like a frightened heart
terrified by its own loneliness. The hand of man was impelling it, an
unseen hand, only telling of its presence by the thin tattoo it sent
through the silence. Words died and they sat rigid in the sudden alarm
that comes upon men in the wilderness. The doctor clutched his
daughter's arm, Daddy John reached for his rifle. Then, abruptly as it
had come, it stopped and they broke into suggestions--emigrants on the
road beyond them, an Indian war drum on the opposite bank.

But they were startled, their apprehensions roused. They sat uneasy,
and half an hour later the pad of horses' hoofs and approaching voices
made each man grip his gun and leap to his feet. They sent a hail
through the darkness and an answering voice came back:

"It's all right. Friends."

The figures that advanced into the firelight were those of four men
with a shadowy train of pack mules extending behind them. In fringed
and greasy buckskins, with long hair and swarthy faces, their feet
noiseless in moccasins, they were so much of the wild, that it needed
the words, "Trappers fro