The driver of Steve’s wagon leaped to his seat, curled the whip over the backs of his eight mules, yelling and gee-hawing at them; there was a great shouting all down the line, an answering accolade from the populace of Independence which had all gathered in the square to watch the departure, and they were off, to the jingle of chains, the rattle of yokes, the yee-hawing of balky mules, rolling down the incline that led away westward, with a flourish and a bravery, right into the setting sun. CHAPTER III DISPUTED EMPIRE To Santa Fe, seven hundred and fifty miles ahead--with but one white settlement in all the distance--lumbered the caravan. There were fifteen wagons, fifty men, and more than three times that many animals. Before them stretched the undulating prairies, waving with deep grass; behind wound the tail of the caravan. Above, the skies were richly blue, gorgeous with vast white clouds. Four nights on the plains, under the stars, listening about the camp fire to talk of trader and trapper. Steven was filled with tales of the Trail, and of the fortunes that lay already mined and minted over the far mountains--theirs for the journeying after. Seated now in the lead wagon beside St. Vrain, Steven wondered if in all that vast wilderness of land there could be other living beings than the fifty men and near two hundred animals of their caravan. “Ha! you think not,” said the Frenchman, chatting now in French, now in English. “In this land”--he swept his hand about the horizon--“live many great nations of red men--Kaw, Kansas, Pawnee, Arapahoe, Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Cheyenne. Many tribes, two to ten thousand strong.” It was the fur-traders, St. Vrain remarked with pride, who had taught the Indians to need white men’s goods--calico, whisky, looking-glasses, and gunpowder. “Not so many people in Santa Fe,” said St. Vrain, “just about two thousand souls, but, _mon Dieu!_ there were near fifty thousand in the state, all told--Mexicans and Pueblo Indians--and that was worth risking something for. The Spaniards had been shipping everything but the foodstuffs of the land up from Mexico for almost three hundred years. And they have further to come than we. What could be easier than this?” “It is wonderful,” Steven agreed, “yet I wonder if those new steam-driven engines which they ran on a track in Maryland last winter will not be crossing this plain some day. Think, they could pull all this freight without any effort at all.”