The Navajo whom Steven had seen the night before came forward and laid a buffalo robe upon the ground. William Bent laid down two sticks, indicating the equivalent in goods for the robe; the Navajo insisted on another stick, a smaller one again, and the colonel appeared to relent. He gave in, when the deal was concluded to the Navajo’s satisfaction. For beaver the Indians got three dollars a pound; there were fifty packs each made up of sixty pelts that would bring five dollars a pound in St. Louis. But Colonel Bent was disappointed. “Ashley got one hundred and twenty-three packs last year,” he complained. For a land otter three dollars was paid, and one dollar for a buck, two doe, or four ’coon skins. The braves were already tottering about, drunk from the whisky they craved and from tulapai, that heady distillation from the giant cactus made by the Apaches. St. Vrain swore and William Bent was angry, for he could see that before the day was half over there would be knifings and quarrels. Where had they gotten it? “A nice way, this, to repay our help,” fumed St. Vrain. “Some of the traders in the other caravan have been selling them liquor.” Alcohol was sold from two to five dollars a pint, but it was against the law to sell to Indians. Some of them were buying tobacco at a dollar and a half a plug, and Steven could scarcely credit his eyes when he saw an Indian give a dollar and sixty cents for a pint cup of gunpowder, while for the same measure of steaming coffee he paid nothing at all at Colonel Bent’s, although at any other trading station even the trappers were obliged to pay one dollar and twenty cents for the drink, sweetened. Steven bought from a young Pueblo Indian who had come up from Taos a beautiful lynx robe, for which he paid in silver. The Indian was delighted with the exchange and naïvely offered additional skins, which Steven refused. He bought also a strange garment made by the Cheyenne squaws of sewed rabbit skins, the only fabric that plains Indians had until the traders came, and for this he gave silver money. “A bad precedent, for a trader,” he was warned. By the time night fell there had been half a dozen brawls, and when Steven entered the big room of the Fort at dusk he saw his friend Pierre gambling with a slight, sandy-haired trapper in fringed buckskins, a lad not much older than Steve and not nearly so tall or so broad. “My fr’en’ Kit Carson,” St. Vrain introduced. “I have tol’ you of the trip we take together two year ago. He’s just back from the Picketwire, as these here folks call Le Purgatoire, the River of Los’ Souls.” The stranger bowed gravely and said with a sad smile, “I’m aimin’ to keep my friend Peer here busy till he gets his fill of playin’; ’cause, if he gambles his nine years’ stake away, isn’t nothin’ will save some one’s getting knifed before mornin’.”