"I can tell you, lad," the latter said one day, when, after passing St. Louis, they had entered the waters of the Missouri, "thar have been changes on this river since I was a youngster. I was raised at St. Louis, which was not much more than a frontier town in those days, and most of the work lay below; here and there there was a farm on the Missouri, but they got thinner as they got higher up, and long before we got to where we are going it was all Indian country. I used to go up sometimes with traders, but I never liked the job: first, I didn't like selling 'fire-water,' as they called it, to the Indians, for it made them mad, and brought on quarrels and wars; in the next place, it was a dangerous business. The Indians used to meet the traders at some place they had appointed beforehand, and there would be big feastings; sometimes the traders would come back with the boat loaded up with buffalo robes and skins, and Indian blankets, and such like; once or twice they didn't come back at all, and it was just a mercy that I didn't stay behind with them on one of the trips. "I went up with a trading party to a place somewhere near this Omaha; we had three boats, with six voyageurs in each. I was about five-and-twenty then, and was steersman of one of them. There were four traders; they were in my boat, and they played cards and drank all the way up. One of the boats was a flat--not a flat like this, but just a big flat-bottomed boat,--for they were going, as I understood, to get some good horses from the Indians and take them down to St. Louis. We had pretty hard work getting her along, and a weak crew would never have got her against the stream, though of course we chose a time when the river was low and there wasn't much stream on. Sometimes we rowed, sometimes we poled, keeping along the shallows and back waters; and, though the pay was good, I wasn't sorry when we got to the place appointed; not only because the work was hard, but because I didn't like the ways of them traders, with their gambling, and drinking, and quarrelling. However, they gave up drink the last day, and were sober enough when they landed.