That evening as Pitamakan, Abbott, and I were preparing to go down into the grove for our nightly watch the engagés were celebrating our victory of the day. They had all assembled in Henri Robarre's lodge, singing quaint songs, boasting of their bravery and accurate shooting, and calling loudly for the women to prepare a little feast, for they were going to dance. The women! They were gathered in another lodge, laughing at their men. Otter Woman, Henri Robarre's wife, who was a wonderful mimic, was making the others ache from laughing as she repeated her man's futile protests and his gait when she had driven him home from the gathering of the men who requested their discharge. "Those women have a whole lot more sense than their men," Abbott remarked. The night passed quietly. Late in the following afternoon, just after we three had ended our daily sleep, the women cried out that they could see the smoke from a down-river steamboat, and Tsistsaki ran to the grove to let my uncle know of its coming. He hurried up to the barricade and eagerly watched the approaching smoke. "We shall have help now; you boys will not have to stand night watch much longer. That old tub is bringing plenty of men!" The boat soon rounded the bend above and drew in to our landing. Two men leaped ashore, and the roustabouts threw their rolls of bedding after them. From the pilot-house Henry Page tossed out to us a weighted sack. "I'm sorry, Wesley, that we couldn't get more men for you. There's a letter that explains it all!" he called. "Well, keep up a good heart; your Blackfeet will soon be with you. So long!" Then the surly captain, standing beside him, rang some bells, Page whirled his big wheel, and the boat went on. The two men came up the bank and greeted us. I had been so intent upon our few words with the pilot that I had not noticed who they were. Now I was glad when I saw the rugged, smooth-shaven faces of the Tennessee Twins, as they were called all up and down the river. The Baxters, Lem and Josh, were independent bachelor trappers who roamed where they willed, despite the hostile war parties of various tribes that were ever trying to get their scalps. They seemed to bear charmed lives. As a rule the American Fur Company had not been friendly toward independent trappers, but those two men were so big-hearted and had done us so many favors that we all thought highly of them; and Pierre Chouteau himself had given orders to all the factors up and down the river that they were to be treated with every consideration. "Well, Wesley, here we are," said Lem Baxter after we had shaken hands all round. "You don't mean that you have come to work for me?" my uncle exclaimed. "That's about the size of it," Josh put in. "You see, 't was this way," Lem went on. "When we heard of the trouble you were in, and Carroll and Steell couldn't engage any men for you, we saw it were our plain duty to come down and lend you a hand." "Who said that we were in trouble?"