A Matter of Friendship

They drank from tin cups, until Bridger began to chant, a deepening
sense of his old melancholy on him.

"Good-by!" he said again and again, waving his hand in general vagueness
to the mountains.

"We was friends, wasn't we, Bill?" he demanded again and again; and
Jackson, drunk as he, nodded in like maudlin gravity. He himself began
to chant. The two were savages again.

"Well, we got to part, Bill. This is Jim Bridger's last Rendyvous. I've
rid around an' said good-by to the mountings. Why don't we do it the way
the big partisans allus done when the Rendyvous was over? 'Twas old Mike
Fink an' his friend Carpenter begun hit, fifty year ago. Keel-boat men
on the river, they was. There's as good shots left to-day as then, an'
as good friends. You an' me has seed hit; we seed hit at the very last
meetin' o' the Rocky Mountain Company men, before the families come. An
'nary a man spilled the whiskey on his partner's head."

"That's the truth," assented Jackson. "Though some I wouldn't trust
now."

"Would ye trust me, Bill, like I do you, fer sake o' the old times, when
friends was friends?"

"Shore I would, no matter how come, Jim. My hand's stiddy as a rock,
even though my shootin' shoulder's a leetle stiff from that Crow arrer."

Each man held out his firing arm, steady as a bar.

"I kin still see the nail heads on the door, yan. Kin ye, Bill?"

"Plain! It's a waste o' likker, Jim, fer we'd both drill the cups."