They met at the breakfast table where Billy, who kept a bachelor home, had busied himself preparing a final good meal for them. They had abundance of nicely browned trout with fresh eggs, milk, and good bread.
The young travelers ate in silence, with the presentiment that this was their last breakfast on the trail. At length Rob turned to the leader of their party with an inquiring look.
“Well, I’ll tell you how I feel, after thinking it over,” said Uncle Dick. “I know you hate to say good-by to Sleepy and Nigger, not to mention our friend Billy Williams here, who is as good a mountain man as you are apt to find and who surely has been fine to us.
“But now we are right on a wagon road. There is no excitement in taking a pack train for a couple of days from here over to Livingston. There is not much excitement in taking a train at Bozeman and going over to Livingston and stopping off.
“Of course, we can go back to the junction and take a train to Great Falls, if you want to do that. We have left our two outboard motors over there, not knowing what we might want to do going back. Now we could have those motors shipped over to us here, and we could go down to the Yellowstone in a skiff, no doubt. Or we could go up to Great Falls and buy a boat, and run down the Missouri. We’d make mighty good time either way, by river.
“But I somehow feel that we have brought our men out of the expedition and we have in a way worn the edge off our trip. So what I think we had better do is to call this our last morning in camp with Billy here, hoping we may meet him some other time. We can take our train here, straight through to St. Paul, and transfer there for St. Louis—all by rail. That will put us home about August 20th, or, say, a week longer than three months out from the mouth of the Missouri.
“As you know, Lewis and Clark came down the Missouri in jig time. They left the Mandan villages on August 17th. Here Colter had left them and gone back up the Yellowstone with the two white traders, later to become famous as the first discoverer of the Yellowstone. Here they left Chaboneau, and the game little Indian woman, his wife Sacágawea.
“I somehow can’t fancy that they ever did enough for that Indian girl. Without her they never would have got across and never would have got back the way they did. She was worth any ten men of the entire party. Well, Lewis and Clark were brief men. Perhaps they did more for her, perhaps they thanked her more, than they have set down in their journals. Knowing them as we ought to, I rather think they did, but they were too shy to say much about it. So there at the Mandans we are obliged to leave some of our party. The others all reached St. Louis about noon on September 23d.
“What they must have left, how they were received is something which we do not need to take up now. At least, they were kept busy by their friends in St. Louis, be sure of that.