When he had made sure that Hope was comfortably taken care of, Steve hurried back to St. Vrain and Bent, who had gone on into the great room of the Fort where business was transacted and traders and trappers ate and lounged and smoked. Here the _engagés_, the trappers employed by St. Vrain and the Bents, passed their time when they were not out on the ranges, hunting. The room was crowded now with as many Indians and hunters and trappers as could squeeze into it, and the air was filled with the smoke of Indian pipes and Mexican cigarettes. Against the smooth adobe walls hung colored blankets. The ceilings were dark beamed with heavy, hand-hewn cedar timbers from the mountains; the floors were roughly boarded. Great fireplaces at either end of the room threw out enough heat to warm the entire place in winter, and now their warmth was such that all the doors were open. Colonel Bent and his brother George slept in small adjoining rooms, and on the other side of the main hall lay the only other completed room, a large _bodega_, or storehouse. A babel of Spanish, French, English, mingled with the strange, halted gutturals and intoned syllables of several Indian tongues. Steven was stirred with that keen delight that he had always felt on the waterfront of the Mississippi, where dark-skinned East Indians and yellow Chinese ate bananas from some South American port. In these faces he fancied he saw strange racial resemblances--the dark, fine aquilinity of the far East in a Cheyenne brave; the broad cheek bones and narrowed eyes of the Japanese leered at him in the blanketed redskin holding out some silverwork for his inspection. “That is Sleek Foot, the Navajo, the slickest fur-trader that ever wandered from his hogan,” warned St. Vrain. “Take nothing of him.... There’s to be no trading till morning, Sleek Foot.” The Navajo grunted a protest. “Colonel Bent’s orders. Then you’ll see something, Steven, my lad, that’ll show you the art of trading.” Through the open doors there now came Indian women bringing great pots and platters of food. Roast fowl of all sorts was heaped on the table, stewed squash and corn bread, the dark beans to which Steven had long since become accustomed, and last of all great hunks of bear meat. As a special feast Colonel Bent had coffee served with that greatest of all delicacies and delights, sugar. The braves and French ’breeds sat on the floor about the wall, and ate with their hunting-knives and fingers from the food that was heaped upon a huge tortilla before each. When they had at length finished, they ate the tortilla and drank from tin cups. The traders sat on benches about the long rough table, and under the swinging lanterns they fed as men should feed. Colonel Bent knew well that to keep the Indians and the trappers well-fed brought to his shelves many a pelt that meant good gold on the Mississippi.