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Nor was Sacajawea idle. With her baby on her back, she opened the nests of prairie mice, and brought home artichokes. Sometimes she brought sprouts of wild onion for the broth, or the pomme blanche,—the peppery Indian turnip. York, too, at his master's direction often gathered cresses and greens for the dinner. But York was becoming a hunter. As well as the best, he "slew dem buffaloes."

Lewis had bought Charboneau's big family tent. Under its leather shelter slept the Captains, with Drouillard and Charboneau and his little family.

Around the twilight fires the men wrote their journals,—Lewis, Clark, Pryor, Ordway, Gass, Fraser, all busy with their stub quill pens and inkhorns, recording the day's adventure.

They were not scholars, any of them, but men of action, pioneers and explorers, heralds of the nation. In their strenuous boyhood they had defended the frontier. Men at sixteen, they took up a man's employment. Lewis, more favoured, prolonged his schooldays until the age of eighteen, then broke away to march with armies.

At last these first civilised sounds that ever broke the silence primeval were hushed. Rolled up like cocoons in their mackinaw blankets, the men were soon snoring in rows with feet to the fires, while a solitary sergeant peered into the lonely night. The high Dakota wind roared among the cottonwoods. Mother Nature, too, kept guard, lighting her distant beacons in the blue above the soldier boys.

In a land of wolves, no wolves molested, though they yelped and barked in the prairie grass. On all sides lay deserted camps of Assiniboine Sioux. Once the expedition crossed the trail of a war party only twenty-four hours old. A dog left behind came to the camp of the explorers and became the pet of Captain Lewis.

"Kip so quiet lak' one leetle mouse," whispered Cruzatte, cautioning silence.

No one cared to meet the Assiniboine Sioux, the "Gens des Grands Diables." Once the smoke