When supper time came around Tom still felt a little reluctant to meet Patience, worried by how she might greet him, although her actions preceding the fight should have told him that his fears were groundless. To his great relief she met him as graciously as she had before, and as a matter of fact he thought he detected a little more warmth and interest, but discounted this because he feared that his judgment might be biased in his favor by his hopes. Uncle Joe apparently had forgotten all about the affair and did not refer to it in any way, confining himself to subjects connected with the great southwest highway, its trade, outfitting, the organization of the caravans, the merchandising at Santa Fe and bits of historical and personal incidents, not forgetting to comment on the personality of Armijo and his arbitrary impost of five hundred dollars on each wagon to cross the boundary, regardless of what its contents might be. He chuckled over the impost, for the goods which he had sent up to Independence by an earlier boat had been selected with that tax in mind. He had his own ideas about the payment of the impost, and although he could not entirely avoid it, he intended to take a great deal of the sting out of it. He contended that the beating of unlawful duties was not cheating, since it was purely a game of one individual outwitting another, one being an arbitrary tyrant who was strongly suspected of pocketing the wagon tax for his own uses. The only trouble with his philosophy was what it set going, for having proved one evasion of tax to be honest it tended to go farther and justify other evasions which fairly crossed the ethical boundaries. One of these was the rumored prohibition of Mackinaw blankets and the export tax on specie. This last would be something of a hardship, for coin was the best and most easily carried of all mediums of payment, and the Mexican government, in levying this tax, would tend to force the traders to barter rather than sell their goods. If payment were had in specie, the wagons could be disposed of at a fair profit and mules used to pack it back to Missouri. When sewed tightly in rawhide bags it became an unshifting mass by the shrinking of the leather under the rays of the sun. Some of the traders took mules in exchange for their goods which, if they could be safely delivered in the Missouri settlements, would give an additional profit of no mean per centum; but losses in mules were necessarily suffered on the long return trip, and the driving, corralling, and guarding of a herd was a task to try the patience of a saint and the ingenuity of the devil. The Indians would take almost any kind of chances to stampede a herd of mules, and they were adepts at the game.