first Tete Rouge was
well contented with this arrangement, but on applying for a dram, the
barkeeper, at the clerk's instigation, refused to let him have it.
Finding them both inflexible in spite of his entreaties, he became
desperate and made his escape from the boat. The clerk found him after
a long search in one of the barracks; a circle of dragoons stood
contemplating him as he lay on the floor, maudlin drunk and crying
dismally. With the help of one of them the clerk pushed him on board,
and our informant, who came down in the same boat, declares that he
remained in great despondency during the whole passage. As we left St.
Louis soon after his arrival, we did not see the worthless, good-natured
little vagabond again.

On the evening before our departure Henry Chatillon came to our rooms
at the Planters' House to take leave of us. No one who met him in the
streets of St. Louis would have taken him for a hunter fresh from the
Rocky Mountains. He was very neatly and simply dressed in a suit of dark
cloth; for although, since his sixteenth year, he had scarcely been for
a month together among the abodes of men, he had a native good taste and
a sense of propriety which always led him to pay great attention to his
personal appearance. His tall athletic figure, with its easy flexible
motions, appeared to advantage in his present dress; and his fine face,
though roughened by a thousand storms, was not at all out of keeping
with it. We took leave of him with much regret; and unless his changing
features, as he shook us by the hand, belied him, the feeling on his
part was no less than on ours. Shaw had given him a horse at Westport.
My rifle, which he had always been fond of using, as it was an excellent
piece, much better than his own, is now in his hands, and perhaps
at this moment its sharp voice is startling the echoes of the Rocky
Mountains. On the next morning we left town, and after a fortnight of
railroads and steamboat we saw once more the familiar features of home.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Oregon Trail, by Francis Parkman, Jr.

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