r, to change
my simile, there is no armor of deception so complete that there is not a
crack in it. We must find that loose end, we must find that crack, and
when we do, we can see victory just ahead of us."

"Do you mean," said Henry, "that Alvarez has probably sent a letter to the
Northern chiefs, promising that as Governor General of Louisiana he will
help them with soldiers and cannon against us in Kentucky?"

"I think it likely, quite likely," returned Oliver Pollock, nodding his
head to give emphasis to his words. "He had to give them something that
would bind. A conspirator must take a risk and in this case it seemed
small. The villages of those chiefs are beyond the Ohio, fifteen hundred
miles at least from here. The chance that such a letter would reappear in
New Orleans was most remote, and Alvarez, might have expected to provide
against that, too, by being Governor General within a few months. I feel
confident that there is such a letter and we must find it."

"It's a pretty problem," said Paul.

"I admit it," said Oliver Pollock, "but a new continent teaches one to
achieve the impossible. That is what are we to do; how, I do not yet know,
but we must do it."

"It's important," said Henry, "that it be done soon."

"It certainly is," said Mr. Pollock with great emphasis, "because I wish
to start North soon with a great fleet of canoes and other boats loaded
with rifles, powder, lead, blankets, medicines, and other absolutely
necessary things for our suffering brethren in the east. They are hard
pressed there, and it takes a long time to pull up the Mississippi and the
Ohio and then carry these things across four or five hundred miles of
country to our army."

"It's shorely a wonderful thing," said Shif'less Sol, "that you kin take
boats up a big river hundreds an' hundreds o' miles into the heart o' a
continent, then bend off into another river runnin' into it that takes
you nearly over to the Atlantic. An' mebbe ef you took one o' the rivers
that runs in it on the other side you might follow it up 'till you got
purty near to the western ocean. It says to me plain ez print that we must
hev this here Mississippi all the way to its mouth. We can't stay bottled
up."

"Sh-sh," said Mr. Pollock, warningly. "Leave that to the future. It will
adjust itself, and I think it will adjust itself in the way that we wish,
but we cannot talk of it now, while Bernardo Galvez is our good friend and
Spain inclines to o