Page:Hugh Pendexter--Kings of the Missouri.djvu/140

 That night they ate as only a borderer can eat after being half-starved for days. Lander was amazed at the portions of meat he devoured. At dawn they were on their way, keeping wide of the river until Papa Clair decided they were near the bend, when they bore south again. Papa Clair should have sensed the possibility of others choosing to walk across the bend, even as he and Lander were doing. Apparently he did not give the matter a thought, and Lander was too green to the country to think of it.

The two fared pleasantly, having eaten heartily, with Papa in a boy's mood and regaling his companion with many stories of the upper country. It was seldom he mentioned those periods of his life spent on the lower Mississippi, in and around New Orleans.

"Call this a bend," he scoffed. "Wait till you go round the Great Bend, thirty miles by boat and only a mile and a half across by land. Before the steamboat it was hard for river men. Last year when Jedediah Smith took some Rocky Mountain Fur men with loaded wagons to the Rockies by way of the Platte and Sweetwater he showed what one could do by land travel. M'sieu Bridger says he could have taken the