e annual "rendezvous" was held and the men of the mountains
gathered from creek and river and spent a year's earnings in a wild
week. But the streams were almost empty now and the great days over.
There was a market but no furs. Old Joe could tell what it had once
been like, old Joe who years ago had been one of General Ashley's men.

The old man took his pipe out of his mouth and shook his head.

"The times is dead," he said, with the regret of great days gone,
softened by age which softens all things. "There ain't anything in it
now. When Ashley and the Sublettes and Campbell ran the big companies
it was a fine trade. The rivers was swarmin' with beaver and if the
Indians 'ud let us alone every man of us 'ud come down to rendezvous
with each mule carrying two hundred pound of skins. Them was the
times."

The quick, laughing patter of the voyageur's French broke in on his
voice, but old Joe, casting a dim eye back over the splendid past, was
too preoccupied to mind.

"I've knowed the time when the Powder River country and the rivers that
ran into Jackson's Hole was as thick with beaver as the buffalo range
is now with buffalo. We'd follow up a new stream and where the ground
was marshy we'd know the beaver was there, for they'd throw dams across
till the water'd soak each side, squeezin' through the willow roots.
Then we'd cut a tree and scoop out a canoe, and when the shadders began
to stretch go nosin' along the bank, keen and cold and the sun settin'
red and not a sound but the dip of the paddle. We'd set the
traps--seven to a man--and at sun-up out again in the canoe, clear and
still in the gray of the morning, and find a beaver in every trap."

"Nothin' but buffalo now to count on," said the other man. "And what's
in that?"

David said timidly, as became so extravagant a suggestion, that a
mountain man he had met in Independence told him he thought the buffalo
would be eventually exterminated. The trappers looked at one another,
and exchanged satiric smiles. Even the Canadian stopped in his chatter
with Susan to exclaim in amaze: "Sacre Tonnerre!"

Old Joe gave a lazy cast of his eye at David.

"Why, boy," he said, "if they'd been killin' them varmints since Bunker
Hill they couldn't do no more with 'em than you could with your little
popgun out here on the plains. The Indians has druv 'em from the West
and the white man's druv 'em from the East and it don't make no
difference. I knowed Capta