"Here's your breakfast, Will," he said. "Beef, a few crackers, and water. Coffee would taste mighty good, but we can't afford to be taking it every morning, or we'd soon use up all we have. This is one of the mornings we skip it."
"I can stand it if you can," said Will cheerfully, "and it seems to me we ought to be saving our other stores, too. You'll have to kill a deer or a buffalo soon, Jim."
"Not until we leave the valley. Now fall on, and when we finish the beef we'll take another look at that map of yours."
They ate quickly and when they were done Will produced from an inside pocket of his waistcoat, where he always carried it, the map which was his most precious possession. It was on parchment, with all the lines very distinct, and the two bent over it and studied it, as they had done so often before.
It showed the Mississippi, flowing almost due south from Minnesota, and the Missouri, which was in reality the upper Mississippi, thrusting its mighty arm far out into the unknown wilderness of the Northwest. It showed its formation by the meeting of the Jefferson, the Madison and the Gallatin, but these three rivers themselves were indicated by vague and faint traces. Extensive dark spaces meant high mountains.
"My father served in the northwest before the great Civil War," said Will, telling it for the fiftieth time, "and he was a man of inquiring mind. If he was in a country he always wished to know all about it that was to be known, particularly if it happened to be a wild region. He had the mind of a geographer and explorer, and the vast plains and huge mountains up here fascinated him. If there was a chance to make a great journey to treat with the Indians or to fight them he always took it."
"And he'd been in California in '49," said Boyd, saying, like Will, what he had said fifty times before. "It was there I first met him, and a fine, upstanding young officer he was."
The lad sighed, and for a moment or two his sorrow was so deep that it gave him an actual thrill of physical pain.
"That's so, Jim. I've often heard him speak of the first time he saw you," he resumed. "He was tempted to resign and hunt gold in California with the crowd, and he did have some experience in the mines and workings there, but he concluded, at last, to remain in the army, and was finally sent into the Northwest with his command to deal with the Indians."
"And it was on the longest of his journeys into the mountains that he found it!"