Page:The Conquest.djvu/186

 om that hour Lewis and Clark threaded the gameland of the world.

"Joost wait onteel dey get ento de boofalo!" commented those wise young voyageurs, Cruzatte and Drouillard, nodding at one another as the cooks served out the savoury meat on the grass, and every man drew forth his long hunting-knife and little sack of salt.

"Where is my old friend, Daniel Boone?" inquired Captain Clark, three days later at Charette, the last settlement on the Missouri border. This, but for Spanish interference, would have been their camping station the previous winter. Colonel Boone, six miles from the Missouri, was holding court beneath his Judgment Tree.

The June rise of the Missouri was at hand. Days of rain and melting snows had set the mad streams whirling. The muddy Missouri, frothing, foaming, tore at its ragged banks that, yawning, heavily undermined, leaped suddenly into the water. Safety lay alone in mid-stream, where the swift current, bank-full and running like a millrace, bore down toward the Mississippi.

To stem it was terrific. In spite of oars and sails and busy poling, the bateau would turn, raked ever and anon with drifts of fallen trees. And free a moment, some new danger arose. Down out of sight, water-soaked logs scraped the keel with vicious grating. And above, formidable battering-rams of snags sawed their black heads up and down defiantly, as if Nature herself had blockaded the way with a chevaux de frise.

Poles broke, oars splintered, masts went headlong, the boat itself careened almost into the depths. It was a desperate undertaking to stem the mad Missouri in the midst of her wild June rise.

But that very rise, so difficult to oppose upstream, was a sliding incline the other way. May 27, two canoes loaded with furs came plunging full tilt out of the north.

"Where from? What news?"

"Two months from the Omaha nation, seven hundred miles up the river," sang out the swiftly passing Frenchmen bound for St.