osed
steamers--brave little steamers!--forging on toward Fort Benton. And it
was so very, very far away--half-way to the moon no doubt! St. Louis was
indeed very far away. But Fort Benton!----

Well, they spoke of the Fort Benton traffic as "the mountain trade," and
I had not then seen a mountain. You could stand on the very tallest
building in Kansas City, and you could look and look and never see a
mountain. And to think how far the brave little steamers had to go! How
_did_ they ever manage to get back?

But the old men on the docks--they had been there and all the way back,
perhaps hundreds of times. And they were such heroes! Great paw-like
hands they had, toughened with the gripping of cables; eyes that had
that way of looking through and far beyond things. (Seamen and plainsmen
have it.) And they had such romantic, crinkly, wrinkly, leathery faces.
They got so on the way to Benton and back. And they talked about
it--those old men lounging on the docks--because it was so far away and
they were so old that they couldn't get there any more.

What a picture I made out of their kaleidoscopic chatter; beautifully
inaccurate, impossibly romantic picture, in which big muscley men had
fights with yawping painted savages that always got gloriously licked,
in the approved story-book manner! I could shut my eyes and see it all
very plainly, away off there half-way to the moon. And I used to wonder
how my father could be such a strong man and never have any hankering to
go up there at all! The two facts were quite incompatible. He should
have been a captain and taken me on for cub pilot, or at least a
"striker" engineer; though I wouldn't have objected seriously to the
business of a cabin boy. I thought it would be very nice to engage in
the mountain trade.

And then, after a while, in the new light that creeps in with years, I
began to rearrange my picture of things up there; and Benton crept a wee
bit closer--until I could see its four adobe walls and its two adobe
bastions, stern with portholes, sitting like bulldogs at the opposite
corners ready to bark at intruders. And in and out at the big gate went
the trappers--sturdy, rough-necked, hirsute fellows in buckskins, with
Northwest fusils on their shoulders; lean-bodied, capable fellows, with
souls as lean as their bodies, survivors of long hard trails, men who
could go far and eat little and never give up. I was very fond of that
sort of man.

Little by little the