“Thank you, son. Well, I guess old Sleepy won’t die before we get there, though he pretends he can hardly go. Say we get back into the side creeks a little and pick up a mess of fish now and then, and make the Beaverhead a couple of camps later? How’d that be?”
“That’s all right, I think,” said Rob. “I’d like to get a look at the main river, to see why the names change on it so. First it’s the main Missouri; then they conclude to call it the Jefferson—only because the other two forks spread so wide there. Then it runs along all right, and all at once they call it the Beaverhead. And before it gets used to that name they change it to Red River for no reason at all, or because it heads south and runs near a painted butte. Yet it is one continuous river all the way.”
“The real way to name a river,” said Billy, sagely, “is after you know all about it. You got to remember that Lewis and Clark saw this for the first time. By the time we make the Beaverhead Rock, we’ll be willing to say they had a hard job. People could get lost in these hills even now, if they stepped off the road.”
“All set for the Beaverhead Rock!” said Uncle Dick, decisively.
Soon they had settled to their steady jog, Nigger sometimes getting lost in the willows, and Sleepy straying off in his hunt for thistles when the country opened out more. They did not hurry, but moved along among the meadows and fields, talking, laughing, studying the wide and varying landscape about them. That night, as Billy had promised them, they had their first trout for supper, which Billy brought in after a short sneak among the willows with a stick for a rod and a grasshopper for bait.
“That’s nothing,” said he. “I’ll take you to where’s some real fishing, if you like.”
“Where’s that?” demanded John, who also was getting very keen set for sport of some sort.
“Oh, off toward the utmost source of the true Missouri!” said he. “You just wait. I’ll show you something.”