But in the evening life returned. When the dusk stole out of the hill rifts and the river flowed thick gold from bank to bank, when the bluffs grew black against the sunset fires, the little party shook off its apathy and animation revived. Coolness came with the twilight, sharpening into coldness as the West burned from scarlet and gold to a clear rose. The fire, a mound of buffalo chips into which glowing tunnels wormed, was good. Overcoats and blankets were shaken out and the fragrance of tobacco was on the air. The recrudescence of ideas and the need to interchange them came on the wanderers. Hemmed in by Nature's immensity, unconsciously oppressed by it, they felt the want of each other, of speech, of sympathy, and crouched about the fire telling anecdotes of their life "back home," that sounded trivial but drew them closer in the bond of a nostalgic wistfulness. One night they heard a drum beat. It came out of the distance faint but distinct, throbbing across the darkness like a frightened heart terrified by its own loneliness. The hand of man was impelling it, an unseen hand, only telling of its presence by the thin tattoo it sent through the silence. Words died and they sat rigid in the sudden alarm that comes upon men in the wilderness. The doctor clutched his daughter's arm, Daddy John reached for his rifle. Then, abruptly as it had come, it stopped and they broke into suggestions--emigrants on the road beyond them, an Indian war drum on the opposite bank. But they were startled, their apprehensions roused. They sat uneasy, and half an hour later the pad of horses' hoofs and approaching voices made each man grip his gun and leap to his feet. They sent a hail through the darkness and an answering voice came back: "It's all right. Friends." The figures that advanced into the firelight were those of four men with a shadowy train of pack mules extending behind them. In fringed and greasy buckskins, with long hair and swarthy faces, their feet noiseless in moccasins, they were so much of the wild, that it needed the words, "Trappers from Laramie," to reassure the doctor and make Leff put down his rifle. The leader, a lean giant, bearded to the cheek bones and with lank locks of hair falling from a coon-skin cap, gave his introduction briefly. They were a party of trappers en route from Fort Laramie to St. Louis with the winter's catch of skins. In skirted, leather hunting shirt and leggings, knife and pistols in the belt and powder horn, bullet mold, screw and awl hanging from a strap across his chest, he was the typical "mountain man." While he made his greetings, with as easy an assurance as though he had dropped in upon a party of friends, his companions picketed the animals which moved on the outskirts of the light in a spectral band of drooping forms.