s at
Fort Vancouver. Ermatinger with his Bardolphian nose cut a laughable figure on Le petit Rouge by the side of his fair bride Catherine on Gardepie.
After the gentry came La Framboise at the head of his long array of French trappers in scarlet belts and Canadian caps, with their picturesque Indian families, the plumes of men and women dancing and waving in the wind, brilliant as a hawking party in the days of mediaeval song.
Michel La Framboise had been a famous voyageur, one of the picked few sent out by John Jacob Astor. He could flip his canoe over the choppy waves where no one else would dare to go. Now, every autumn after the harvest was over, he led the horse brigade to the Spanish country.
The trappers always travelled with their families; the mother bestrode the family horse, with its high-pommelled Mexican saddle; the children jogged along on their Cayuse ponies and slept until night, when down they slid, full of glee, gathering flowers, shooting their little arrows, and listening to tales of grizzly bears and Blackfeet.
La Framboise was proud of his half-breed wife, Angelique, his Grande Dame, in her bloomers of beaded blue broadcloth; Angelique was proud of the pretty white pappoose that dangled from her pommel, asleep in its little miau of beads and ribbon. Close behind came the children, with elfin locks and flashing eyes, with one hand whipping their horses to make the bells go "zing-zing-zing," with the other hugging tight the buckskin dollies with blue bead eyes and complexions chalked to the whiteness of the charming missionary women.
The Indian boys brought up the rear, lashing their
