CAPTAIN WILLIAM CLARK
“
Will!”
“Merne!”
The two young men gripped hands as the great bateau swung inshore at the Point of Rocks on the Kentucky side of the Ohio. They needed not to do more, these two. The face of each told the other what he felt. Their mutual devotion, their generosity and unselfishness, their unflagging unity of purpose, their perfect manly comradeship—what wonder so many have called the story of these two more romantic than romance itself?
“It has been long since we met, Will,” said Meriwether Lewis. “I have been eating my heart out up at Pittsburgh. I got your letter, and glad enough I was to have it. I had been fearing that I would have to go on alone. Now I feel as if we already had succeeded. I cannot tell you—but I don’t need to try.”
“And you, Merne,” rejoined William Clark—Captain William Clark, if you please, border fighter, leader of men, one of a family of leaders of men, tall, gaunt, red-headed, blue-eyed, smiling, himself a splendid figure of a man—“you, Merne, are a great man now, famous there in Washington! Mr. Jefferson’s right-hand man—we hear of you often across the mountains. I have been waiting for you here, as anxious as yourself.”
“The water is low,” complained Lewis, “and a thousand things have delayed us. Are you ready to start?”
“In ten minutes—in five minutes. I will have my boy York go up and get my rifle and my bags.”
“Your brother, General Clark, how is he?”