One from Arkansa stalks into the center of the room, with a pack of cards in his hand and a handful of dollars in his hat. Squatting crosslegged on a buffalo-robe, he smacks down the money and cries out "Ho, boys! hyar's a deck, and hyar's the beaver" (rattling the coin); "who dar set his hoss? Wagh!" Tough are the yarns of wondrous hunts and Indian perils, of hairbreadth'scapes and curious "fixes." Transcendent are the qualities of sundry rifles which call these hunters masters; "plum" is the "center" each vaunted barrel shoots; sufficing for a hundred wigs is the "hair" each hunter has "lifted" from Indians' scalps; multitudinous the "coups" he has "struck." As they drink so do they brag, first of their guns, their horses, and their squaws, and lastly of themselves: and when it comes to that, "ware steel." La Bonté, on his arrival at St. Louis, found himself one day in no less a place than this; and here he made acquaintance with an old trapper about to start for the mountains in a few days, to hunt on the head-waters of Platte and Green River. With this man he resolved to start, and, having still some hundred dollars in cash, he immediately set about equipping himself for the expedition. To effect this, he first of all visited the gun-store of Hawken, whose rifles are renowned in the mountains, and exchanged his own piece, which was of very small bore, for a regular mountain rifle. This was of very heavy metal, carrying about thirty-two balls to the pound, stocked to the muzzle, and mounted with brass; its only ornament being a buffalo bull, looking exceedingly ferocious, which was not very artistically engraved upon the trap in the stock. Here, too, he laid in a few pounds of powder and lead, and all the necessaries for a long hunt. His next visit was to a smith's store, which smith was black by trade and black by nature, for he was a nigger, and, moreover, celebrated as being the best maker of beaver-traps in St. Louis; and of him he purchased six new traps, paying for the same twenty dollars--procuring, at the same time, an old trap-sack made of stout buffalo-skin in which to carry them. We next find La Bonté and his companion--one Luke, better known as Gouge-Eye, one of his eyes having been "gouged" in a mountain fray--at Independence, a little town situated on the Missouri, several hundred miles above St. Louis, and within a short distance of the Indian frontier.