I rode up to the stranger and replied--"From the Leone on the Rio Grande," and offered him my hand, which he shook heartily. "Are you a trapper? and where from?" I asked him. "From Missouri; my name--Ben Armstrong--has been known for the last forty years in the Rocky Mountains, and I have now been back for a year from the old State." He invited us to go to his camp and spend the night with him, as he longed to hear something about events in the old States. We accepted his invitation, and followed him along a narrow path through the bushes and rocks to a spot some hundred yards above the pond, where we dismounted in front of some thick scrub, and passed through it with our host. We stepped on to a cleared spot, from which the axe had removed the bushes, at whose northern end heavy masses of rock rose above each other, and hanging over at a height of thirty feet, covered a large space. Over the whole place a number of dried beaver skins was suspended from the branches, as well as the hide of a grizzly, and many others of deer and antelopes. Under the rocks lay several bundles of beaver skins, while one of them drawn up near the fire seemed to have served our host as a seat. Antonio and Königstein went down to the pond with our horses, where there was excellent grass, and watched over them in turn with my other comrades. I saw a track of a horse leading to our host's abode, and asked him whose it was, to which he replied that on this trip, for the first time in his life, he had taken a partner, a young Kentuckian of the name of Gray, who was at present out hunting on horseback, to get some venison, as they were sick of beaver meat. The next day, he said, they intended to leave their camp, as they had trapped all the beavers round, otherwise he would not have been so incautious as to lead so many horses to his hiding-place and thus betray it to passing Indians. He always led his own horse through the scrub up the stream, and let it graze on the opposite side, so that its track might not lead to his camp. Our host now filled a cup from a small cask of whisky three of which lay under the rocks, and, as he told us, constituted his sole luxury. He loaded an extra mule with them when he started, but it had been killed some months previously by a couguar, as it had got loose at night. He readily offered us his favourite liquid and a cup of fresh spring water, and after taking a hearty pull himself he put six beaver tails in front of the fire, and we put all our coffeepots with them, and unpacked our small stock of biscuit, while we set the remaining marrow-bones from yesterday to roast.