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 picture grew. Indian bull boats flocked at the
river front beneath the stern adobe walls; moored mackinaws swayed in
the current, waiting to be loaded with peltries and loosed for the long
drift back to the States; and the keel-boats, looking very fat and lazy,
unloaded supplies in the late fall that were loaded at St. Louis in the
early spring. And these had come all the way without the stroke of a
piston or the crunch of a paddle-wheel or a pound of steam. Nothing but
grit and man-muscle to drag them a small matter of two or three thousand
miles up the current of the most eccentric old duffer of a river in the
world!

What men it did take to do that! I saw them on the wild shelterless
banks of the yellow flood--a score or so of them--stripped and sweating
under the prairie sun, with the cordelle on their calloused shoulders,
straightening out to the work like honest oxen. What _males_ those
cordelle men were--what _stayers_! Fed on wild, red meat, lean and round
of waist, thick of chest, thewed for going on to the finish. Ten or
fifteen miles a day and every inch a fight! Be sure they didn't do it
merely for the two or three hundred dollars a year they got from the