"'Smell badly, marm,' says Black Harris, 'would a skunk stink if he was froze to stone? No, marm, this child didn't know what putrefactions was, and young Sublette's varsion wouldn't 'shine' nohow, so I chips a piece out of a tree and puts it in my trap-sack, and carries it in safe to Laramie. Well, old Captain Stewart, (a clever man was that, though he was an Englishman,) he comes along next spring, and a Dutch doctor chap was along too. I shows him the piece I chipped out of the tree, and he called it a putrefaction too; and so, marm, if that wasn't a putrefied peraira, what was it? For this hos doesn't know, and _he_ knows 'fat cow' from 'poor bull,' anyhow.' "Well, old Black Harris is gone under too, I believe. He went to the 'Parks' trapping with a Vide Pôche Frenchman, who shot him for his bacca and traps. Darn them Frenchmen, they're no account any way you lays your sight. (Any 'bacca in your bag, Bill?' this beaver feels like chawing.) "Well, any how, thar was the camp, and they was goin to put out the next morning; and the last as come out of Independence was that ar Englishman. He'd a nor-west[20] capôte on, and a two-shoot gun rifled. Well, them English are darned fools; they can't fix a rifle any ways; but that one did shoot 'some;' leastwise _he_ made it throw plum-center. He made the bufler 'come,' _he_ did, and fout well at Pawnee Fork too. What was his name? All the boys called him Cap'en, and he got his fixings from old Choteau; but what he wanted out thar in the mountains, I never jest rightly know'd. He was no trader, nor a trapper, and flung about his dollars right smart. Thar was old grit in him, too, and a hair of the black b'ar at that.[21] They say he took the bark of the Shians when he cleared out of the village with old Beaver Tail's squaw. He'd been on Yaller Stone afore that: Leclerc know'd him in the Blackfoot, and up in the Chippeway country; and he had the best powder as ever I flashed through life, and his gun was handsome, that's a fact. Them thar locks was grand; and old Jake Hawken's nephey, (him as trapped on Heely that time,) told me, the other day, as he saw an English gun on Arkansa last winter as beat all off hand. [20] The Hudson Bay Company, having amalgamated with the American North West Company, is known by the name 'North West' to the southern trappers. Their employés usually wear Canadian capôtes. [21] A spice of the devil. "Nigh upon two hundred dollars I had in my possibles, when I went to that camp to see the boys afore they put out; and you know, Bill, as I sat to 'Euker' and 'seven up'[22] till every cent was gone. [22] "Euker," "poker," and "seven-up," are the fashionable games of cards. "'Take back twenty, old coon,' says Big John.