The Magnificent Adventure Part 28

Tears are in my eyes as I write. Do you forget that promise?

Do you wish to make yet happier the woman whom you have so many times made happy--who has cherished so much ambition for you?

Meriwether Lewis, my friend--you who would have been my lover--for whom there is no hope, since fate has been so unkind--come back to us in your generosity! Come back to me, even in your hopelessness! Will you always see me with tears in my eyes? Do you see me now? I swear tears fall even as I write. And you promised always to kiss my tears away!

Farewell until I see you again. May good fortune attend you always, wherever you go--in whatever direction you may travel--from us or toward us--from me or with me!

Meriwether Lewis sat, his face between his hands, staring down at what he saw. Should he go on, or should he hand over all to William Clark and return--return to keep his promise--return to comfort, as best he might, with the gift of all his life, that face which indeed he had left in tears by an unpardonable act of his own?

He owed her everything she could ask of him. What must she think of him now--that he was not only a dishonorable man, but also a coward running away from the responsibility of what he had done? No blow from the hands of fate could have given him more exquisite agony than this.

For a long time--he never knew how long--he sat thus, staring, pondering, but at length with sudden energy he rose and flung open the door of the dancing-room.

"Will!" he called to his companion.

When William Clark joined his friend in the outer air, he saw the open letter in Lewis's hand--saw also the distress upon his countenance.

"Merne, it's another letter from that woman! I wish I had her here, that I might wring her neck!" said William Clark viciously. "Who brought it?"

"I don't know."

Meriwether Lewis was folding up the letter. He placed it in the pocket of his coat with its fellow, received months ago.

"Will," said he at length, "don't you recall what I was telling you this very morning? I felt something coming--I felt that fate had something more for me. You know I spoke in doubt."

"Listen, Merne!" replied William Clark. "There is no woman in the world worth the misery this one has put on you. It is a thing execrable, unspeakable!"

His friend looked him steadily in the eyes.

"Rebuke not her, but me!" he said. "This letter asks me to come back to kiss away a woman's tears. Will, I was the cause of those tears. I can tell you no more. What _I_ did was a thing execrable, unspeakable--I, your friend, did that!"

William Clark, more genuinely troubled than ever in his life before, was dumb.

"My future is forfeited, Will," went on the same even, dull voice, which Clark could scarcely recognize; "but I have decided to go on through with you."

CHAPTER VI

WHICH WAY?

"Which way, Will?" asked Meriwether Lewis. "Which is the river? If we miss many guesses, the British will beat us through. Which is our river here?"

They stood at the junction of the Yellowstone with the Missouri, and faced one of the first of their great problems. It was spring once more. The geese were flying northward again; the gra.s.s was green.

Three weeks ago the ice had run clear, and they had left their winter quarters among the Mandans.

Five months they had spent at the Mandan village; for five months they had labored to reach that place; for five months, or more, they had lain at St. Louis. Time was pa.s.sing. As Meriwether Lewis said, few wrong guesses could be afforded.

Early in April the great barge, manned by ten men, had set out down stream, carrying with it the proof of the success of the expedition.

It bore many new things, precious things, things unknown to civilization. Among these were sixty specimens of plants, as many of minerals and earth, weapons of the Indians, examples of their clothing, specimens of the corn and other vegetables which they raised, horns of the bighorn and the antelope--both animals then new to science--antlers of the deer and elk, stuffed specimens, dried skins, herbs, fruits, flowers; and with all these the broken story of a new geography--the greatest story ever sent out for publication by any man or men; and all done in Homeric simplicity.

As the great barge had started down the river, the two pirogues which had come so far, joined by the cottonwood dugouts laboriously fabricated during the winter months, had started up the river, manned by thirty-one men.

With the pick of the original party, there had come but one woman, the girl Sacajawea, with her little baby, born that winter at the Mandan fortress. Sacajawea now had her place in the camp; she and her infant were the pets of all. She sat in the sunlight, her baby in her lap, by her side an Indian dog, a waif which Lewis had found abandoned in an Indian encampment, and which had attached itself to him.

Sacajawea smiled as the tall form of the captain came toward her. She had already learned some of the words of his tongue, he some of hers.

"Which way, Sacajawea?" asked Meriwether Lewis. "What river is this which goes on to the left?"

"Him Ro'shone," replied the girl. "My man call him that. No good!

_Him_--big river"; and she pointed toward the right-hand stream.

"As I thought, Will," said Lewis, nodding; and again, to the Indian girl: "Do you remember this place?"

She nodded her head vigorously and smiled.

"See!"

With a pointed stick she began to sketch a map on the sand of the river bar, showing how the Yellowstone flowed from the south--how, far on ahead, its upper course bent toward the Missouri, with a march of not more than a day between the two. The maps of this new world that first came back to civilization were copies of Indians' drawings made with a pointed stick upon the earth, or with a coal on a whitened hide.

"She knows, Will!" said Lewis. "See, this place she marks near the mountain summit, where the two streams are close--some time we must explore that crossing!"

"I'm sure I'd rather trust her map than this one, here, of old Jonathan Carver," answered Clark, the map-maker. "His idea of this country is that four great rivers head about where we are now. He marks the river Bourbon--which I never heard of--as running north to Hudson Bay, but he has the St. Lawrence rising near here, too--and it must be fifteen hundred or two thousand miles off to the east! The Mississippi, too, he thinks heads about here, at the mouth of the Yellowstone, and yonder runs the Oregon River, which I presume is the Columbia. 'Tis all very simple, on Carver's maps, but perhaps not quite so easy, if we follow that of Sacajawea. This country is wider than any of us ever dreamed."

"And greater, and more beautiful in every way," a.s.sented his companion.

They stood and gazed about them at the scene of wild beauty. The river ran in long curves between bold and sculptured bluffs, among groves of native trees, now softly green. Above, on the prairies, lay a carpet of the shy wild rose, most beautiful of the prairie blossoms. All about were shrubs and flowers, now putting forth their claims in the renewed life of spring.

On the plains fed the buffalo, far as the eye could reach. Antelope, deer, the shy bighorn, all these might be seen, and the footprints of the giant bears along the beaches. It was the wilderness, and it was theirs--they owned it all!

Thus far they had seen no sign of any human occupancy. They did not meet a single human being, red or white, all that summer. A vast, silent, unclaimed land, beautiful and abounding, lay waiting for occupancy. There was no map of it--none save that written on the soil now and then by an Indian girl sixteen years of age.

They plodded on now, taking the right-hand stream, with full confidence in their guidance, forging onward a little every day, between the high banks of the swift river that came down from the great mountains. April pa.s.sed, and May.

"Soon we see the mountains!" insisted Sacajawea.

And at last, two months out from the Mandans, Lewis looked westward from a little eminence and saw a low, broken line, white in spots, not to be confused with the lesser eminences of the near by landscape.

"It is the mountains!" he exclaimed. "There lie the Stonies. They do exist! We shall surely reach them! We have won!"

Not yet had they won. These s.h.i.+ning mountains lay a long distance to the westward; and yet other questions were to be settled ere they might be reached.

Within a week they came to yet another forking of the stream. A strong river came boiling down from the north, of color and depth much similar to that of the Missouri they had known. On the left ran a less turbulent and clearer stream. Which was the way?

"The north wan, she'll be the right wan, _Capitaine_," said Cruzatte, himself a good voyageur.

Most of the men agreed with him. The leaders recalled that the Mandans had said that the Missouri after a time grew clear in color, and that it would lead to the mountains. Which, now, was the Missouri?