"What do you mean, Merne? Surely, if I do, you will also!"
"I cannot be sure."
The florid face of William Clark showed a frown of displeasure.
"You are not as well as you should be--you work too much. That is not just to Mr. Jefferson, Merne, nor to our men, nor to me."
"It was for that reason I took you on. Doesn't a man have two lungs, two arms, two limbs, two eyes? We are those for Mr. Jefferson--even crippled, the expedition will live. You are as my own other hand. I exult to see you every morning smiling out of your blankets, hopeful and hungry!"
Meriwether Lewis turned to his colleague with the sweet smile which sometimes his friends saw.
"You see, I am a fatalist," he went on. "Ah, you laugh at me! My people must have been owners of the second sight, I have often told you. Humor me, Will, bear with me. Don't question me too deep. Your flag, Will, I know will be planted on the last parapet of life--you were born to succeed. For myself, I still must remember what my mother told me--something about the burden which would be too heavy, the trail which would be long. At times I doubt."
"Confound it, Merne, you have not been yourself since you got that accursed letter in the night last summer!"
"It was unsettling, I don't deny."
"I pray Heaven you'll never get another!" said William Clark. "From a married woman, too! Thank God I've no such affair on my mind!"
"It is taboo, Will--that one thing!"
And Clark, growling anathemas on all women, stalked away to find his axmen.
The snows had come soft and deep, blown on the icy winds. The horses of the Mandans were housed in the lodges, and lived on cottonwood instead of grass. When the vast herds of buffalo came down from the broken hills into the shelter of the flats, the men returned frostbitten with their loads of meat. The sky was dark. The days were short.
To improve the morale of their men, the leaders now planned certain festivities for them. On Christmas Eve each man had his stocking well stuffed with such delicacies as the company stores afforded--pepper, salt, dried fruits long cherished in the commissary, such other knickknacks as might be spared.
On Christmas Day Drouillard brought out a fiddle. A dance was ordered, and went on all day long on the puncheon floor of the main cabin. In moccasins and leggings, with hair long and tunics belted close to their lean waists, the white men danced to the tunes of their own land--the reels and hoedowns of old Virginia and Kentucky.