Shoulder to shoulder with this "boy" stood Rube Herring, and not a hair's-breadth difference in height or size was there between them. Killbuck, though mountain winters had sprinkled a few snow-flakes on his head, _looked up_ to neither; and La Bonté held his own with any mountaineer who ever set a trap in sight of Long's Peak or the Snowy Range. Marcelline--who, though a Mexican, despised his people and abjured his blood, having been all his life in the mountains with the white hunters--looked down easily upon six feet and odd inches. In form a Hercules, he had the symmetry of an Apollo; with strikingly handsome features, and masses of long black hair hanging from his slouching beaver over the shoulders of his buckskin hunting-shirt. He, as he was wont to say, was "no dam Spaniard, but mountainee man, wagh!" Chabonard, a half-breed, was not lost in the crowd;--and, the last in height, but the first in every quality which constitutes excellence in a mountaineer, whether of indomitable courage or perfect indifference to death or danger--with an iron frame capable of withstanding hunger, thirst, heat, cold, fatigue, and hardships of every kind--of wonderful presence of mind and endless resources in times of peril--with the instinct of an animal and the moral courage of a _man_,--who was "taller" for his inches than Kit Carson, paragon of mountaineers? * Small in stature, and slenderly limbed, but with muscles of wire, with a fair complexion and quiet intelligent features, to look at Kit none would suppose that the mild-looking being before him was an incarnate devil in Indian fight, and had raised more hair from head of Redskins than any two men in the western country; and yet, thirty winters had scarcely planted a line or furrow on his clean-shaven face. No name, however, was better known in the mountains--from Yellow Stone to Spanish Peaks, from Missouri to Columbia River--than that of Kit Carson, raised in Boonlick, Missouri State, and a credit to the "diggins" that gave him birth. * Since the time of which we speak, Kit Carson has distinguished himself in guiding the several U. S. exploring expeditions under Frémont across the Rocky Mountains, and to all parts of Oregon and California; and for his services, the President of the United States presented the gallant mountaineer with the commission of lieutenant in a newly- raised regiment of mounted riflemen, of which his old leader Frémont is appointed colonel. (Author's note.)