ntiment 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 Sacagawea.

"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