"Captain Lewis is mad. Look at that river! They say that when the boat started last week it took them an hour to make a quarter of a mile, when they struck into the Missouri. How many thousands of hours will it take to ascend to the mountains? How will you get your boats across the mountains? What cascades and rapids lie on ahead? Your men will mutiny and destroy you. You cannot succeed--you will fail!"
"I thank you, madam!"
"Oh, you must start now, I presume--in fact, you have started; but I want you to come back before your obstinacy has driven you too far."
"Just what do you mean?"
"Listen. You have given me no time, unkind as you are--not a moment--at an hour like this! In these unsettled times, who knows what may happen? In that very unsettlement lies the probable success of the plan which my father and I have put before you so often. We need you to help us. When are you going to come back to us, Merne?"
As she spoke, they were approaching the long wharf along the water front, lined with rude craft which plied the rivers at that time--flatboats, keel-boats, pirogues, canoes--and, far off at the extremity of the line, the boat which Lewis and his friends were to take. A party of idlers and observers stood about it even now. The gaze of the young leader was fixed in that direction. He did not make any immediate sign that he had heard her speech.
"I told Shannon, my aide, to meet me here," he said at last. "He was to fetch my long spyglass. There are certain little articles of my equipment over yonder in the wharf shed. Would you excuse me for just a moment?"
He stooped at the low door and entered. But she followed him--followed after him unconsciously, without plan, feeling only that he must not go, that she could not let him away from her.
She saw the light floating through the door fall on his dense hair, long, loosely bagged in its cue. She saw the quality of his strong figure, in all the fittings of a frontiersman, saw his stern face, his troubled eye, saw the unconscious strength which marked his every movement as he strode about, eager, as it seemed to her, only to be done with his last errands, and away on that trail which so long had beckoned to him.
The strength of the man, the strength of his purpose--the sudden and full realization of both--this caught her like a tangible thing, and left her no more than the old, blind, unformed protest. He must not go! She could not let him go!