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.

Captain Lewis would have felt relieved had it attracted more. Before
he read any of the words that lay before him, in this same delicate
handwriting that he knew so well, he cast a slow and searching gaze
upon the face of every man that was turned toward him. In fact, he
held the letter up to view rather ostentatiously, hoping that it would
evoke some sign; but he saw none.

He had not been in touch with the main party for more than a month. He
had with him nine men. Which of these had secretly carried the letter?
Was it Gass, Cruzatte, Drouillard, Reuben Fields, or McNeal?

He studied their faces alternately. Not an eyelash flickered. The men
who looked at him were anxious only for his comfort. There was no
trace of guilty knowledge on any of these honest countenances before
him, and he who sought such admitted his own failure. Meriwether Lewis
lay back on his couch in the boat, as far as ever from his solution of
the mystery.

After all, mere curiosity as to the nature of that mystery was a small
matter. It seemed of more worth to feel, as he did, that the woman
who had planned this system of surprises for him was one of no
ordinary mind. And it was no ordinary woman who had written the words
that he now read:

SIR AND MY FRIEND:

Almost I am in despair. This is my fifth letter; you receive
it, perhaps, some months after your start. I think you would
have come back before now, if that had been possible. I had
no news of you, and now I dread news. Should you still be
gone a year from the time I write this, then I shall know
that you were dead. Dead? Yes, I have written that word!

The swift thought comes to me that you will never see this
at all--that it may, i