One night, alone, the leader sat by his little fire, thinking, thinking, as so often he did now. The stars, unspeakably brilliant, lit up the wild scene about him. This was the wilderness! He had sought it all his life. All his life it had called to him aloud. What had it done for him, after all? Had it taught him to forget?
Two years now had passed, and still he saw a face which would not go away. Still there arose before him the same questions whose debate had torn his soul, worn out his body, through these weary months.
"You will be cold, sir," said one of the men solicitously, as he passed on his way to guard mount. "Shall I fetch your coat?"
Lewis thanked him, and the man brought from his tent the captain's uniform coat, which he had forgotten. Absently he sought to put it on, and felt something crinkling in the sleeve. It was a bit of paper.
He halted, the old presentiment coming to his mind.
"Is Shannon here?" he asked of the man who had handed him the coat. "He was to get my moccasins mended for me."
"No, captain, he is out with Captain Clark," replied Fields, the Kentuckian.
"Very well--that will do, Fields."
Meriwether Lewis sat down again by his little fire, his last letter in his hand. Gently he ran a finger along the seal--stooped over, kicked together the embers of the fire, and saw scratched in the wax a number. This was Number Three!
He did not open it for a time. He looked at it--no longer in dread, but in eagerness. It seemed to him, indeed, as if the letter had come in response to the outcry of his soul--that it really had dropped from the sky, manna for a hungry heart. It was the absence of this which had worn him thin, left him the shadow of the man he should have been.
Here, as he knew well, was one more summons to what seemed to him to be a duty. And off to the west, shining cold in the night under the stars, stood the mountains, beckoning. Which was the way?
He broke the seal slowly, with no haste, knowing that whatever the letter said it could mean only more unhappiness to him. Yet he was hungry for it as one who longs for a soothing drug.
He pushed together yet more closely the burning sticks of his little fire and bent over to read. It was very little that he saw written, but it spoke to him like a voice in the night: Come back to me--ah, come back! I need you. I implore you to return!