Page:The Conquest.djvu/367

 nd miles up the Missouri. June 2 Lisa caught up with Hunt near the present Bismarck, and met Andrew Henry coming down with forty packs of beaver.

To avoid the hostile Blackfeet, Hunt bought horses and crossed through the Yellowstone-Crow country to the abandoned fort of Henry on the Snake, and on to the Columbia.

Aboard that barge with Lisa went Sacajawea. True to her word, she had brought the little Touissant down to St. Louis, where Clark placed him with the Catholic sisters to be trained for an interpreter. Sacajawea was dressed as a white woman; she had quickly adopted their manners and language; but, in the words of a chronicler who saw her there, "she had become sickly, and longed to revisit her native country. Her husband also had become wearied of civilised life."

So back they went to the Minnetarees, bearing pipes from Clark to the chiefs. Five hundred dollars a year Charboneau now received as Indian agent for the United States. For more than thirty years he held his post, and to this day his name may be traced in the land of Dakota.

We can see Sacajawea now, startled and expectant, her heart beating like a trip-hammer under her bodice, looking at Julia! No dreams of her mountains had ever shown such sunny hair, such fluffs of curls, like moonrise on the water. And that diaphanous cloud,—was it a dress? No Shoshone girl ever saw such buckskin, finer than blossom of the bitter-root.

"I am come," said Sacajawea.

A whole year she had tarried among the whites, quickly accommodating herself to their ways. But in the level St. Louis she dreamed of her northland, and now she was going home!

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