“Lewis also figured that Fidler in his map showed only small streams coming in from the west, ‘and the presumption is very strong that those little streams do not penetrate the Rocky Mountains to such distance as would afford rational grounds for a conjecture that they had their sources near any navigable branch of the Columbia.’ He was right in that—and he says those little creeks may run into a river the Indians called the Medicine River. Now that is the Sun River, which does come in at the Falls, but which Lewis had never seen!

“Again, the Minnetaree Indians had told him, in their long map-making talks at the Mandan winter quarters, that the river near the Falls was clear, as he now saw this stream. The Minnetarees told him the Missouri River interlocked with the Columbia. And as he was now straight west of the Minnetarees, he figured that when they went hunting to the head of the Missouri, as they had, they couldn’t have passed a river big as this south fork without mentioning it. And the Indians said that the Falls were a ‘little south of the sunset’ from the Mandans—and Lewis had his latitude to show he was still on that line and ought to hold to it.

“Lastly, he reasoned that so large a river must penetrate deeply into the Rockies—and that was what he wanted. He knew it could not rise in dry plains. So, relying on his Minnetarees and his horse sense, and not on Mr. Fidler, Lewis refused to go any farther north, because he could not figure out there a big river penetrating into the Rockies. He was absolutely right, as well as very shrewd and wise.

“Now, reasoning at first shot, the voyageurs would have gone up the Marias. Cruzatte especially, their best riverman, was certain the Marias was the true Missouri. They would then maybe have met the Blackfeet and would never have crossed the Rockies; which would have meant failure, if not death; whereas this cold-headed, careful young man, Meriwether Lewis, by a chain of exact reasoning on actual data, went against the judgment of the entire party and chose the left-hand fork, which we know is the true Missouri; and which we’ll find hard enough to follow to its head, even to-day.

“Think over that, boys. Do you begin to see what a man must be, to be a leader? We have had plenty of Army men in Western exploration since then, plenty of engineers who could spell. But in all the records you’ll not find one example of responsibility handled as quietly and decisively as that. You must remember the pressure he was under. It would have been so easy to take the united conviction of all these old, grizzled, experienced voyageurs and hunters.

“Well, if Clark and he argued over it, at least that is not known. But all the men took the decision of the two leaders without a whimper. I think the personnel of that party must have been extraordinary. And their leaders proved their judgment later.

“Now, with poor Sacágawea expected to die, and with all the responsibility on their shoulders, our captains acted as though they had no doubts. If they did have, Lewis solved it all when he ascended the Marias on his way home next year.

“Now the water was getting swift. They knew nothing of what was ahead, but their load was heavy. So now they hid their biggest boat in the willows on an island, at the mouth of the Marias, and dug a cache for a great deal of their outfit—axes, ammunition, casks of provisions, and much superfluous stuff. They dug this bottle shaped, as the old fur traders did, lined it with boughs and grass and hides, filled it in and put back the cap sod—all the dirt had been piled on skins, so as not to show. Stores would keep for years when buried carefully in this way.

“So now, lighter of load, but still game—with Cruzatte playing the fiddle for the men to dance of evenings—on June 12th they ‘set out and proceeded on,’ leaving this great and historical fork of the water road on the morning of June 12th, with Sacágawea so very sick that the captains took tender care of her all the trip, though they speak slightingly of Chaboneau, her husband, who seems to have been a bit of a mutt. One of the men has a felon on his hand; another with toothache has taken cold in his jaw; another has a tumor and another a fever. Three canoes came near being lost; and it rained. But they ‘proceeded on,’ and on that day they first saw the Rockies, full and fair! And three days later Lewis found the Great Falls, hearing the noise miles away, and seeing the great cloud of mist arising above the main fall.

“And then they found the eagle’s nest on the cottonwood island, of which the Minnetarees had told them. And then Sacágawea got well, and gave the O.K. after her delirium had gone! And then every man, woman, and child in that party agreed that their leaders were safe to follow!

“It took them one month to get over that eighteen miles portage. That made five weeks they had lost here out of direct travel. But they never did lose courage, never did reason wrong, and never did go back one foot. Leadership, my boys! And both those captains, Lewis especially, had a dozen close calls for death, with bears, floods, rattlesnakes, gun-shot, and accidents of all kinds. Their poor men also were in bad case many a time, but they held through. No more floggings now, this side of Mandan—maybe both men and captains had learned something about discipline.”

Their leader ceased for the time, and turned, hat in hand, to the ruined quadrangle of adobe, the remnants of old Fort Benton. The boys also for a moment remained silent. Jesse approached and touched the sleeve of his Uncle Dick.

“I wouldn’t have missed this for anything,” said he. “I can see how they all must have felt when they got here, where they could see out over the country once more. Do you suppose it was right here that they stood?”

John was ready with his copy of the Journal, which now the boys all began to prize more and more.

“Here it is,” said he, “all set down in the finest story book I ever read in all my life. Captain Lewis and Captain Clark say they

“Does it check up, boys?” Uncle Dick smiled. “I think it does, except that our old ruins are not right where they then stood on the Missouri. The river mouth is below here. There is a high tongue of land between the Teton River, just over there, where it runs close along the Missouri, two or three hundred yards away, but I hardly think that was where they stood.

“But though the works of man have changed many times, and themselves been changed by time, the works of God are here, as they were in June of 1805—except that the wild game is gone forever.

“Lewis or Clark could not dream that in 1812 a steamboat would go down the Ohio and the Mississippi; nor that some day a steamboat would land here, close to the Marias River.

“But after Lewis and Clark the fur traders poured up here. Then came the skin hunters and their Mackinaws, following the bull boats which took some voyageurs downstream. Then the river led the trails west, and the bull outfits followed the pack trains. So when the adventurers found gold at the head of the Missouri they had a lane well blazed, surely.

“Fort Benton was not by any means the first post to be located at or near this great point, the mouth of the Marias. In 1831 James Kipp, the father of my friend, Joe Kipp, put up a post here, but he did not try to hold it. The next year D. D. Mitchell built Fort McKenzie, about six miles above the Marias, on the left bank—quite a stiff fort, one hundred and twenty by one hundred and forty feet, stockaded—and this stuck till 1843. Then their continual troubles with the Blackfeet drove them out. Then there was Fort Lewis, in the neighborhood, somewhere, in 1845.

“Fort Benton was put up in 1850. And as the early stockades of Booneville and Harrodsburg and Nashville in Kentucky were on ‘Dark and bloody ground,’ so ought the place where we now are standing be called the dark and bloody ground of the Missouri River, for this indeed was a focus of trouble and danger, even before the river trade made Benton a tough town.”

“Well, the glory of old Benton is gone!” said Rob, at last. “Just the same, I am glad we came here. So this is all there is left of it!”

“Yes, all there is left of the one remaining bastion, or corner tower. It was not built of timber, but of adobe, which lasted better and was as good a defense and better. Many a time the men of Benton have flocked down to meet the boat, wherever she was able to land; and many a wild time was here—for in steamboat days alcohol was a large part of every cargo. The last of the robes were traded for in alcohol, very largely. And by 1883, after the rails had come below, the last of the hides were stripped from the last of the innumerable herds of buffalo that Lewis and Clark saw here, at the great fork of the road into the Rockies; and soon the last pelt was baled from the beaver. If you go to the Blackfeet now you find them a thinned and broken people, and the highest ambition of their best men is to dress up in modern beef-hide finery and play circus Indian around the park hotels.

“Well, this was their range, young excellencies, and this was the head of the disputed ground between the Crows, Nez Percés, Flatheads, and Shoshonis, all of whom knew good buffalo country when they saw it.

“And yet, what luck our first explorers had! They surely did have luck, for they had good guidance of the Minnetarees among the Mandans, and then, from the time they left the Mandans until the next fall, beyond the Three Forks of the Missouri, they never saw an Indian of any sort! At the Great Falls, a great hunting place, they found encampments not more than ten days or so old, but not a soul.

“Thus endeth the lesson for to-day! I’m sorry we haven’t a camp to go to to-night instead of a hotel, but I promise to mend that matter for you in a day or so, if Billy Williams is up from Bozeman with his pack train, as I wired him. I said the fifteenth, and this is the thirteenth, so we’ve two days for the Falls. I wish we didn’t know where they were! I wish I didn’t know the Marias isn’t the Missouri. I wish—well, at least I can wish that old Fort Benton was here and the whistle of the steamboat was blowing around the bend!”

“Don’t, sir!” said Rob. “Please don’t!”

“No,” said John. “To-day is to-day.”

“All the same,” said Jesse, “all the same——”

CHAPTER XIX

“Well, it’s all right, I suppose,” replied Jesse. “I suppose they have to have cities, of course. I suppose they have to have those big smelters over there and all those other things. Maybe it’s not the same. The buffalo are not here, nor the elk—though the Journal says hundreds of buffalo were washed over the falls and drowned, right along. Then, the bears are not here any more, though it was right here that they were worst; they had to fight them all the time, and the only wonder was that no one was killed, for those bears were bad, believe me——”

“Sure, they must have been,” assented John. “There were so many dead buffalo, below the falls, where they washed ashore, that the grizzlies came in flocks, and didn’t want to be disturbed or driven away from their grub. And these were the first boats that ever had come up that river, the first white men. So they jumped them. Why, over yonder above the falls were the White Bear Islands; so many bears on them, they kept the camp so scared up all the time, they had to make up a boat party and go over and hunt them off. They used to swim this river like it was a pond, those bears! They kept the party on the alert all day and all night. They had a dozen big fights with them.”

“Humph!” Jesse waved an arm to the broad expanse of flat water above the great dam of the power company. “Is that so? Well, that’s what I mean. Where’s the big tree with the black eagle’s nest? How do we know this is the big portage of the Missouri at all? No islands, no eagle. Yet you know very well it was the sight of that eagle’s nest that made Lewis and Clark know for sure that they were on the right river. The Indians didn’t say anything about the Marias River being there at all; they never mentioned that to either Clark or Lewis when they made their maps in the winter with the Mandans. But they did mention that eagle nest on the island at the big falls—they thought everybody would notice that—and when you come to think of it, that did nail the thing to the map—no getting around the nest on the island at the falls.

“Oh, I suppose this town’s all right, way towns go. Only thing is, they ought not to have spoiled the island and the eagle nest with their old dam. How do we know this is the place?”

“Well, we’ll have to chance that, Jess,” said Rob. “Quite a drop here, anyhow, all these cascades. If we’d brought the Adventurer all the way up the river from Mandan, and got to the head of the rapids, I guess we’d think it was the place to portage.”

“Yes; and where’d we get any cottonwood tree around here, to cut off wheels for our boat wagon?” demanded John. “Eighteen miles and more, it was, that they portaged, after they’d dug their second big cache and hid their stuff and covered up the white perogue at the head of their perogue navigation (they’d left the big red perogue at the Marias).

“And it took them a solid month to do that eighteen miles. The little old portage right here was the solidest jolt they’d had, all the way up the river to here—two thousand five hundred and ninety-three miles they called it, to the mouth of the Medicine River; which means the Sun River, that comes in just above the falls. Portage? Well, I’ll call it some portage, even for us, if we had to make it!”

“Huh! Dray her out and put her on bicycle wheels and hitch her to a flivver and haul her around—two or three whole hours! Mighty risky and adventurous, isn’t it? I want my bears! Especially I want my eagle! I’ve been counting on that old black eagle, all the way up, cordelling from the mouth of the Yellowstone.”

“Well,” resumed Rob, “at least they’ve named the Black Eagle Falls here after him. They’ve honored him with a dam and a bridge and a power house and a smelter and a few such things. And if we’d got here a little earlier—any time up to 1866 or 1872, or even later, maybe, we’d have seen Mr. Eagle, and he’d have shown us that this was his place.”

“I know it!” broke in John. “You didn’t get that from the Journal. That’s another book, later.”[2]

“Well, it said that Captain Reynolds of the army saw that eagle nest on the cottonwood tree on the island in 1866, and he thought it like enough was Lewis’s eagle. And then in 1872 T. P. Roberts, in his survey, was just below those falls, and a big eagle sailed out from its nest in the old broken cottonwood, on the island below the falls, and it tackled him! He says it came and lit on the ground near him and showed fight. Then it flew around, not ten feet away, and dropped its claws almost in his face. He was going to shoot it. One of his men did shoot at it. Well, I suppose some fellow did shoot it, not long after that. I’d not like to have the thought on my mind that I’d been the man to kill the Meriwether Lewis black eagle.” Rob spoke seriously, and added:

“Yet in Alaska the government pays a fifty-cent bounty on eagle heads, and they killed six thousand in one year—maybe several times that, in all, for all I know—because the eagles eat salmon! Well, that didn’t save the salmon. The Fraser River, even, isn’t a salmon river any more; and you know how our canneries have dropped.”

“Poor old eagle!” said Jesse. “Well, for one, I refuse to believe that this is the Big Portage. Nothing to identify it.”

“Not much,” admitted Rob. “Not very much now. The falls that Roberts named the Black Eagle Falls are wiped out by the dam. The island is gone, the cottonwood is gone, the eagle and his mate are gone. That’s the uppermost fall of the five. It’s inside the city limits, where we are now.”

“She was just twenty-six feet five inches of a drop,” said the exact John. “Clark measured them all, the whole five of them, with the spirit level. They call the little fellow, only six feet seven inches, the Colter Falls, after John Colter, one of the expedition—only Lewis and Clark didn’t name it at all, for Colter hadn’t become famous then as the discoverer of the Yellowstone.

“Lewis liked the big Rainbow Fall about the best of the lot—it was so clean cut, all the way across the river. He named that one, and it stuck. He named the Crooked Falls, too, and that stuck. It must have been natural for somebody to name the Great Falls, because the drop there is eighty-seven feet and three-fourths of an inch, as Clark made it with his little old hand level. But they didn’t name the big fall, though they did the Crooked, which is only nineteen feet high.”

“Lewis saw the rainbow below this fall,” said Jesse. “Of course, that’s why he named it. We could go down the stair easily and see it, if we wanted to. If it’s the same rainbow, and if it’s still there, the only reason is they couldn’t melt up the rainbow and sell it, somehow. I don’t want to see it. I don’t care about all the smelters. I want my old cottonwood tree and my island and my eagle!

“I wonder who killed the eagle!” he went on. “Probably he threw it in the river and let it float over the falls. Maybe some section hand stuck a feather of that eagle in his hat and called it macaroni! For me, I’m never going to shoot at an eagle again, not in all my life.”

“Nor am I,” nodded Rob, gravely.

“Neither shall I,” John also agreed.

“Well, at least the rainbow is left,” said Rob, at length, “and the Big Spring that Clark found is still doing business at the edge of the river below the smelter above the Colter Fall—cold as it was one hundred and sixteen years ago, and more than a hundred yards across. Nature certainly does things on a big scale here. What a sight all this must have been to those explorers who were the first to see it!

“But, so far as that goes, talking of changes, I don’t think the general look and feel of this portage has changed as much as lots of the flat country away down the river—Floyd’s Bluff, or the Mandan villages, lots of places where the river cut in. Here the banks are hard and rocky. They can’t have altered much. It was a hard enough scramble over the side ravines, when we were coming up from camp, wasn’t it, even if we didn’t have dugout canoes on cottonwood solid wheels and willow axles—breaking down all the time?”

“But, Rob, a month—a whole month!” said John. “That must have made them worry a good deal, because now it was the middle of summer, and they didn’t know where they were going or how they would get across.”

“They did worry, more than they had till then. Now, I think they must have had quite a lot of stuff along, all the time. They had whisky, for instance—they drank the last of it right here at the Great Falls, and Uncle Dick says that was the first time Montana went dry! They had a grindstone. And they had an iron boat—or the iron frame of a boat—brought it all the way from Harper’s Ferry, in Virginia, where Lewis had it made.

“That boat was the only bad play they made. She was Lewis’s pet. I don’t know why they never set her up before, but, anyhow, they did, at the head of the falls here. She had iron rods for gunwales, and they spliced willows to stiffen her. She was thirty-six feet long, and four and one-half feet beam, a couple of feet deep, and would carry all their cargo, while a few men could carry her. You see, Lewis had the skin-boat coracle in mind before he left Washington.

“Well, Lewis wanted elk-hides for his boat, and the elk were scarce; he had his men out everywhere after elk-hides. He got twenty-eight hides, and took off the hair, and that wasn’t enough; so he took four buffalo-hides to piece her out. And then she wouldn’t do! No. Failure; the first and only failure of a Lewis and Clark outdoor idea.

“Well, Lewis was fair enough, though it mortified him to lose days and days on his pet boat. They sewed the skins with edged awls, and that cut the holes rather big, so when the hides dried and shrunk, the threads didn’t fill the holes any more. He had no tar to pay the seams with, or he’d have been all right. They tried tallow and ashes, but it wouldn’t work. For a few minutes she sat high and light; then the filling soaked out. Poor Lewis!—he had to give it up. So they buried her, somewhere opposite the White Bear Islands, I suppose, where they had their camp.”

“Yes, and then Clark had to go and hustle cottonwood for some more dugouts, and cottonwood was a long, long way off,” contributed John. “Oh, they had their troubles. Hah! We complained, coming up Portage Creek, and over the heads of the draws, trying to find their old portage trail. What if we’d been in moccasins? What if we’d been packing a hundred pounds or dragging at a hide wagon rope? And what if the buffalo had cut up the ground in rainy times, so it dried in little pointed lumps like so many nails—how’d that go in moccasins? Well, they had to lie down and rest, it was so awfully hard on them. But they never a one flickered, leader or enlisted men, and they put her through!”

“It was a whole month?” queried Jesse.

“Yes,” John informed him, referring to the Journal once again. “It was June 14th when Shields came back downstream from Lewis, and told Clark’s boat party that they had found the falls, and it was July 15th when they got their new canoes done and started off up the river.”

“And I’ll bet they were fussed up about things,” said Jesse. “Must have been scared.”

“No, I don’t think they were,” said Rob. “Well, anyhow, in one month they had surveyed and staked out their portage trail around the big falls, had cached their heavy stores, had built new boats, had killed all the meat they could use, and had proceeded on. They now knew that they were almost to the western edge of the buffalo. On west, as I expect Sacágawea also told them, they might have to come to horse meat and salmon. That didn’t stop our fellows. They proceeded on.”

“Time they did!” said Jesse.

“Yes. They had been away from St. Louis just a year and two months, when they left the Falls, here. Let’s have a look at the map.”

They sat down, here on the bank of the great river, on the edge of the great modern town, in sight of many smelter smokes, and bent over the old maps that William Clark had made with such marvelous exactness more than a hundred years ago.

“She seems to go in long sweeps, the old Missouri,” said John, pointing with his finger.

“First we went almost west, to Kansas City, Missouri. Then almost north, to Sioux City, Iowa. Then northwest to Pierre, South Dakota, and then north to Bismarck, North Dakota. Then she runs strong northwest to the Yellowstone, and then straight west to here. From here she takes one more big angle, and runs almost south to the Three Forks.”

“Look it!” pointed Jesse. “She starts below Forty, at St. Louis, and goes north almost to Forty-nine, and then she drops down again to Forty-five at the Three Forks. And Lewis had observations on latitude and longitude right along. Wonder what he thought!”

“He did a great deal of thinking,” said Rob. “He had the conviction that so great a river must run deep into the Rockies—he insisted on that. Then he had the Indians at Mandan to give him some local maps. And he had Sacágawea, worth more than them all for local advice in a tight place where no one else had been ahead. It’s wonderful, if you study it, to see how he made all those things work together, and how he used his brains and his reason all the way across. Even about his pet portable boat, he didn’t sit down and cry. He did the next thing.”

“And proceeded on!”

“And proceeded on, yes.”

“Well,” concluded Jesse, “even if my eagle and my island are gone, I suppose I’ll have to admit that this place is the real portage. They saw the Rockies right along now. They threw those canoes into the high, too!”

“Tracking and poling, pretty soon now, and a fine daily average,” nodded Rob. “And now I don’t suppose that we need just feel that we’ve funked anything by not sticking to our boat all the time, and taking a pack train here; because Clark or Lewis, or both of them, and a good many of the men, walked a lot of the time from here, hunting and scouting and figuring on ahead.”

“That’s so!” said Jesse. “Where were their horses all the time?”

“None above the Mandans,” said Rob; “maybe not that far. They started with two, and picked up one, and one died—that’s the record up to the Sioux. But beyond the Mandans they hoofed it, or poled and paddled and pulled. They couldn’t sail the canoes—they gave that up. And now both their perogues were left behind. So when they left the old eagle on his broken tree, and the savage white bears all along here, and the rattlesnakes and everything else that tried to stop them here, they drew their belts in and threw her in the high—that’s right, Jess.”

“And speaking of the portage,” he continued, “Uncle Dick told me to get a wagon and follow down as close as we could to our camp and get our stuff all up to a place above the White Bear Islands, and go into camp there until he came in with Billy Williams and the pack horses, from his ranch on the Gallatin, near the Forks. So that’s a day’s work, even with a flivver—which I think we’ll use part way. Time we set out and proceeded on, fellows.”

They turned away from the Great Falls of the ancient river, in part with a feeling of sadness. Jesse waved his hand toward the Black Eagle Falls.

“The only thing is——” said he.

The others knew Jesse was wishing for the wild days back again.

CHAPTER XX

“Easy now, Jess,” rejoined his older friend. “Leave that to Uncle Dick. He told me he was going to get us some sport within ten days from here—fishing, I mean—trout, and even grayling. Of course, at this season there’d be nothing to shoot. Lewis and Clark killed all sorts of game at all sorts of seasons, but they had to do that to live. They had thirty-two people in their party, all working hard and eating plenty. They would eat a whole buffalo every day, or a couple of elk, so somebody had to be busy. It would have taken a lot of fried eggs and marmalade to put them up and over those rapids. But as you say, we’ve got to suppose a hundred years to have elapsed, so we don’t kill a buffalo every day.”

“I could eat half of one, any day!” said John. “I get awfully hungry, just from fighting the mosquitoes.”

“I’ll bet they were bad enough. The old Journal says more about mosquitoes than any other hardship. Even Gass in his journal tells how bad they were here at the Great Falls—I think they feared them more than they did the white bears or the rattlesnakes; and they had plenty of them all. In one day Lewis was chased into the river by a grizzly, charged by three buffalo bulls, and nearly bitten by a rattler!”

“Must have been a busy day!” said John.

“Well, I expect every day was busy for them. For instance, when they got to this camp for the upper headquarters, they had to build two more canoes, ten miles above here. That made eight in all for the thirty-two people, or four to a canoe. I don’t think they ever carried that many with their cargo; and they had quite a lot of cargo, even then. They were eating pork on the Continental Divide—their last pork!”

“No,” said Jesse, “they never did all ride at once. First one captain went ahead on foot, then the other. You see, they got into mountain water pretty soon now. They used the tow line a great deal, or poled the boats rather than paddled. Comes to getting a heavily loaded boat up a heavy river, you’ve got to put on the power, I’m telling you.”

“Yes, sir,” nodded Rob. “They knew they had to travel now. About all they had to go on was the girl Sacágawea’s word that pretty soon they’d come to her people.

“So they set out from here on July 15th, the very day that we will, if we get off to-morrow; only it took them one year more to get here than it did us. And two men were in each canoe—not enough to drive her, they found. And Lewis and the girl walked on this side the river, and after a while Clark walked on the other side—all on foot, of course. He had Fields and Potts and his servant York with him—all alone in the Indian country, of which not one of them knew a foot.

“And now,” went on Rob, “they were once more against that same old very risky proposition of a divided party, part in boats and part on shore. I tell you, and we ought to know it, from our own experiences up North, that that’s the easiest way to get into trouble that any wilderness travelers could think up. They simply had marvelous luck. For instance, after Clark left them above here, on July 18th, he never saw them oftener than once a day again until July 22d, and that was away up at the head of the big Cañon.

“To the Three Forks was two hundred and fifty-two and one-half miles, as Clark called it, though engineers now say it is only two hundred and ten miles. He walked clean around the big Cañon of the Missouri at the Gate of the Mountains—below Helena, that is—and never saw it at all! Now if you say he walked the whole ten days from the head of the falls to the Forks, and say it was only two hundred and ten miles and not over two hundred and fifty, that’s over twenty miles a day, on foot, in the mountains, under pack and a heavy rifle, in moccasins, and over prickly-pear country that got their feet full of thorns. Clark pulled out seventeen spines, broken off in his feet, one day when he stopped.

“Now that takes good men to do that. Not many sportsmen of to-day could do it, I know that. And yet, after four days’ absence spent in this wild country where they were the first white men, they met again at the head of the Cañon below the Forks, just as easy and as natural as if they had telephoned to each other every day! I call that exploring! I call those chaps great men!”

“Reader will suppose one hundred years to have elapsed,” drawled Jesse, again. “I’d telephone Uncle Dick now, if I knew where he was.”

“Leave him alone,” said John. “I give him till to-morrow. It was only a week ago he got word through to Billy Williams, in the Three Forks Valley, to come on with his horses.”

“Well,” said Jesse, “if I’m not to have half a buffalo to-night, and if Cruzatte, the bow man, isn’t here to play a jig for us, I’ll see what I can do about some fried eggs and marmalade.”

“And I’ll like to get a leg over leather once more,” said John. “I’m looking for horses now, same as Lewis and Clark did along in here for a few weeks.”

The young travelers did not have so long to wait as they had feared. That very night, as they sat about their fire on their bed rolls, talking of their many trips together, they heard in the darkness not far away the tremulous note of a screech owl, repeated again a moment later. Jesse stopped talking, turning his head. Rob laughed: “That’s Uncle Dick now!” he said, in a low tone; and answered with an owl call just like the one they had heard. They heard a laugh in the dark, and from behind the tent stepped Uncle Dick.

“How!” said he.

“How!” said each of the boys gravely. Rob made the Indian sign of “sit down”—his fist struck down on the robe that was spread by the little fire.

Their companion sat down, not saying a word. Pretty soon he began to talk in “sign talk,” the boys all watching closely.

“Me. Gone. Two sleeps. I come here, now, me. Sun comes up. We go. We. Cross water. Horse—four. Ah! Two——”

Uncle Dick broke out laughing. John shook his fingers, loosely, to say, “What’s that?”

“That’s what I don’t know!” Uncle Dick said, laughing again. “I don’t know what the sign is for ‘mule.’ It isn’t elk, or deer, or wolf, or buffalo. Oh, of course, split fingers over another finger—that means ‘Ride horse.’ But that does not mean ‘mule’! And if I put on ears, how’d you know I didn’t mean ‘deer with-big-ears,’ or ‘mule deer,’ and not ‘mule’? The Indians had mule deer, but they didn’t have mules!”

“Yes, they did!” said Jesse. “The Journal says they bought one mule of the Shoshonis, away west of here!”

“Does it? I’d forgotten. Well, I’d like to know where those people got that mule out here, in 1805! I’d have been no more surprised to see a mastodon really walking around out here. Of course, you know that President Jefferson wrote Lewis not to be surprised if he did see the mastodon still living in this unknown country. You see, all of them knew about the mastodon bones found in the Big Lick, Kentucky. They didn’t know a thing about this new world we’d just bought of Napoleon, mastodons, mules, and all.

“Well, anyhow, Billy Williams has his camp five or six miles from here, across, and he has four saddle broncs and two perfectly good mules for the packs—one plumb black and one plumb white—both ex-army mules and I suppose fifty years or so old. I think old Sleepy, the white one, is the wisest animal I ever saw on four legs—I’ve been out with Sleepy before, and with Billy, too. Good outfit, boys—small, no frills, all we need and nothing we don’t.

“I’ve left our outboard motors here in town with a friend. Most wish we hadn’t brought them around. But we’ll see how much time we have when we get done projecting around at the head of the river.

“I can promise you some knotty problems up in there. To me, what’s ahead of us in the next two weeks was the most exciting part of the whole Lewis and Clark trip across.”

“But, Uncle Dick, you promised us some sport—fishing, I mean—trout and grayling.”

“Jesse,” said his uncle, “yes, I did. And being a good Indian myself, I’m going to keep my word to the paleface. We’ll take a week off with Billy’s flivver, if Billy’s mules connect with the flivver; and I’ll promise you, even now, hard hit as every trout water is all through here, the finest trout fishing—and the only grayling fishing—there is left in all America. How does that strike you?”

“Good! Where’s it going to be?” demanded Jesse.

“Never you mind. That’s a secret just yet. Billy knows.”

“And we don’t have to suppose a hundred years have elapsed?”

“No! Now turn in, fellows, or Billy’ll think we’re lazy in the morning.”

CHAPTER XXI

They shook hands all around, the young rancher quietly estimating his young charges, and they in turn making up their opinions regarding him, which, needless to say, were not unfavorable, for none were quicker than they to know a good outdoor man when they saw him.

“So this is old Sleepy?” said Jesse, going up to the sleek big white mule that stood with drooping head, the stalk of a thistle hanging out of a corner of his mouth. “He’s fat and strong, isn’t he? What makes him look so sad? And aren’t you afraid he’ll run away? He hasn’t even a halter on him.”

“No, he won’t run away,” replied Billy. “You couldn’t drive him away from the packs. He always comes up every morning to be packed, and he always stands around like he was going to die—but he isn’t. Sleepy’ll live another hundred years, anyhow.

“I never hobble or tie or picket Sleepy at night; he sticks close to old Fox. That’s my horse, the red one. You’d think Fox was going to die, too, but he isn’t. He used to be a cow horse; and a mean one, too, they say; but all at once he reformed and since then he’s led a Christian life, same as Sleepy.

“About that thistle. Sleepy is very fond of thistles—he’ll stop the whole train to eat one. Usually he carries one hanging in his mouth, so’s to eat it when he gets hungry. He’s a wise one, that mule. I’ll bet you, an hour before camp to-night you’ll see him wake up and get frisky; all his tired look is just a bluff. And I’ll bet you, too, you can’t manage to ride ahead of Sleepy on the trail. He never will take the last place on the trail.”

“Why, how’s that?” said Jesse. “I should think he’d like to loaf behind, if he’s so wise.”

“No, Sleepy has got brains. He knows that if he gets a stone in his foot, or if his pack slips, a man is his best friend. So he just goes ahead where folks can see that he’s comfortable. You can’t ride ahead of him; he’ll gallop on and won’t let you pass him; so don’t try.

“Nigger, that other mule, doesn’t care—some one’ll have to keep him moving. I usually carry a little rubber sling shot in my pocket, and when Nigger gets too lazy and begins to straggle off I turn around and peck him one with a pebble. Then you ought to see him get into his place and promise to be good!

“I’ve got quite a pack train, at home on the Gallatin, but your uncle said this was all I was to bring. Can we take all your stuff?”

Uncle Dick smiled at that and showed him the four rolls, neat and compact. “The robes make most of the bulk,” said he.

“Yes. Well, I hope they can keep warm in July,” said Billy.

“But we like ’em,” said Jesse. “It’s more like the old times.”

“Yes. Well, I hope you’ve got some mosquito bar. We’ve still got a few old-time mosquitoes in the valley; but in a week or two now they’ll all be gone.”

“Trust these boys to have what they need, and no more,” said Uncle Dick. “Now fall to and get on the loads while I take back my borrowed skiff.”

Billy looked at the boys dubiously. “Well, I’ll make it the ‘lone packer’ hitch,” said he.

“Oh, they’ll help you,” said Uncle Dick. “They can throw almost any diamond, from the ‘government’ hitch down to the ‘squaw’ hitch. You see, we’ve lived up North a good deal, and learned to pack anything—man, dog, or mule.”

“So? Well, all right.” He turned to Rob. “Better take off side,” he said; “the mules are more used to me for near side. I never blindfold them.”

They began with Sleepy, and soon had two packs in the sling ropes, a third on top, with all ready to lash. Rob asked no questions, but went on, taking slack and cinching at the word. Billy laughed.

“Tried you on the old U. S. hitch,” said he. “None better. Set?”

“All set!”

“Cinch!” Rob put his foot against Sleepy’s far side and drew hard. In a jiffy the ropes flew into the tight diamond and Billy tied off. “She’s a good one!” intoned Rob. Billy laughed again.

“I guess you’ve been there before,” said he.

“How about you boys—can you all ride? My saddle stock’s all quiet, far as I know, but——”

“I think we can get by,” said Rob. “We’re not fancy, but we can ride all day.”

“Well, you try out the lengths of the stirrup leathers for yourselves, and I’ll lace them for you. First let’s get your loose stuff in the panniers on Nigger—I brought along one pair of kyacks, for it’s easier to carry the cooking stuff and the loose grub that way than it is to make up packs in the mantas every day.”

John, who was cook for that week, now began to open and rearrange his kitchen pack; and Rob was standing off side, ready to handle the lash rope, when all at once they heard a snort and the trampling of hoofs.

They turned, to see Jesse just manage to get his seat on one of the horses, which plunged away, his head down, bucking like a good fellow. For a moment or so Jesse hung on, but before anyone could mount and help him he was flung full length, and lay, his arms out, motionless. It all happened in a flash.

They ran to him. At once Rob dragged him up, sitting, in front of him, and dragged his shoulders back, pressing his own knee up and down the boy’s spine. He saw that no bones were broken, and was using some revival methods he had learned on the football field.

“Ouch! Leggo!” said Jesse, after a little. “What’s the matter?”

Rob let him up. He staggered around in a circle two or three times, dazed. “Gee!” said he, laughing at last. “Where’d I drop from?” Then they all laughed, very gladly, seeing he had only been stunned by the fall.

“All right, son?” asked Billy, coming to him anxiously. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know——”

“My fault, sir,” said Jesse, stoutly. “I admit it. I ought to have known more than to mount any Western horse from the right side and not the left. My fault. But, you see, I had the laces loose on the stirrup, so I just thought I’d climb up on the other side and try the length there.”

“You’re right—that’s not safe,” said Billy. “I never knew that cayuse to act bad before. Are you afraid of him now?”

“Naw!” said Jesse, scoffing. “Bring him over—only fasten that leg leather. I’ll ride him.”

“Better let me top him off first.”

“No, sir! He’s in my string and I’ll ride him alone!”

Billy allowed him to try, since he saw that the horse was now over his fright, but he mounted his own horse first and rode alongside, after he had the stirrup fixed. To the surprise of all, the horse now was gentle as a lamb, and Jesse kicked him in the side to make him go.

“Horse is a funny thing,” said Billy. “He ain’t got any real brains, like a mule. He gets scared at anything he ain’t used to, and he can’t reason any. Now look at Sleepy!”

That animal did not even turn his head, but stood under his pack with eyes closed, taking no interest in their little matters.