ich you loved more than me--which you loved more than fame
or fortune, honor or glory for yourself. The wilderness! It
holds you. And for me--when at last I come to lay me down,
I hope, too, some wilderness of wood or waters will be
around me with its vast silences.

After all, what is life? Such a brief thing! Little in it
but duty done well and faithfully. I know you did yours
while you lived. I have tried to do mine. It has been hard
for me to see what was duty. If I knew as absolute truth
that conviction now in my heart--that you never can come
back--how then could I go on?

Meriwether--Merne--Merne--I have been calling to you! Have
you not heard me? Can you not hear me now, calling to you
across all the distances to come back to me? I cannot give
you up to the world, because I have loved you so much for
myself. It was a cruel fate that parted us--more and more I
know that, even as more and more I resolve to do what is my
duty. But, oh, I miss you! Come back to me--to one who never
was and never can be, but _is_----

Yours,

THEODOSIA.

It took him long to read this letter. At last his trembling hand
dropped the creased and broken sheets. The guttering light went out.
The men were silent, sleeping near their fires. The peace of the great
plains lay all about.

She had said it--had said that last fated word. Now indeed he knew
what voice had called to him across the deeps!

He reflected now that all these messages had been written to him
before he left her; and that when he saw her last she was standing,
tears in her eyes, outraged by the act of the man whom she had
trusted--nay, whom she had loved!

CHAPTER XIII

THE NEWS

A horseman rode furiously over the new road from Fort Bellefontaine to
St. Louis village. He carried news. The expedition of Lewis and Clark
had returned!

Yes, these men so long thought lost, dead, were coming even now with
their own story, with their proofs. The boats had passed Charette, had
passed Bellefontaine, and presently would be pulling up the river to
the water front of St. Louis itself.

"Run, boys!" cried Pierre Chouteau to his servants. "Call out the
people! Tell them to ring the bells--tell them to fire the guns at the
fort yonder. Captains Lewis and Clark have come back again--those who
were dead!"

The little settlement was afire