They found Captain Lewis sitting up, propped against a clump of willows, his legging stripped to the thigh. He was critically examining the path of the bullet, which had passed through the limb. At seeing him still alive, his men gave a shout of joy, and Cruzatte received a parting kick from his sergeant.
There were actual tears in the eyes of some of the men as they gathered around their commander—tears which touched Meriwether Lewis deeply.
“It is all right, men!” said he. “Do not be alarmed. Do not reprove the man too much. The sight of a little blood should not trouble you. We are all soldiers. This is only an accident of the trail, and in a short time it will be mended. See, the bone is not broken!”
They aided him back to the boats and made a bed upon which he might lie, his head propped up so that he could see what lay ahead. Other men completed the evening hunt, and the boats hurried on down the river. The next day found them fifty miles below the scene of the accident.
“Sergeant,” said Meriwether Lewis, “the natural fever of my wound is coming on. Give me my little war-sack yonder—I must see if I can find some medicine.”
Gass handed him his bag of leather, and Lewis sought in it for a moment. His hand encountered something that crinkled in the touch—crinkled familiarly! For one instant he stopped, his lips compressed as if in bodily pain.
It was another of the mysterious letters!
Before he opened it, he looked at it, frowning, wondering. Whence came these messages, and how, by whose hand? All of them must have been written before he left St. Louis in May of 1804. Now it was August of 1806. There was no human agency outside his own party that could have carried them. How had they reached him? What messenger had brought them? He forgot the fever of his wound in another and greater fever which arose in his blood.
He was with his men now, their eyes were on him all the time. What should he do—cast this letter from him into the river? If he did so, he felt that it would follow him mysteriously, pointing to the corpus delicti of his crime, still insistent on coming to the eye!
His men, therefore, saw their leader casually open a bit of paper. They had seen him do such things a thousand times, since journals and maps were a part of the daily business of so many of them. What he did attracted no attention.