"I should think it was enough!" said his sister, laying down her work.

"But it didn't last!" said Uncle Dick.

"How can you speak so!"

"Well, it didn't. Of course, Rob got in, even if he had to run away
and smouch a little about how old he was. But he wasn't through his
training. And as for the other boys, Frank was solemn as an owl
because the desk sergeant laughed at him and told him to go back to
the Boy Scouts; and Jesse was almost in tears over it."

"All our boys!"

"Yes! All our boys. The whole country'd have been in it if it had gone
on. America doesn't play any game to lose it."

"Yes, and look at you!"

Uncle Dick moved his leg. "Cheap!" said he. "Cheap! But we don't talk
of that. What I was talking about, or was going to talk about, was
something by way of teaching these boys what a country this America is
and always has been; how it never has played any game to lose it, and
never is going to."

"Well, Richard, what is it this time?" His sister began to fold up her
work, sighing, and to smooth it out over her knee. "We've just got
settled down here in our own country, and I was looking for a little
rest and peace."

"You need it, after your Red Cross work, and you shall have it. You
shall rest. While you do, I'll take the boys on the trail, the Peace
Trail--the greatest trail of progress and peace all the world ever
knew."

"Whatever can you mean?"

"And made by two young chaps, officers of our Army, not much more
than boys they were, neither over thirty. They found America for us,
or a big part of it. I call them the two absolutely splendidest and
perfectly bulliest boys in history."

"Oh, I know! You mean Lewis and Clark! You're always talking of them to
the boys. Ever since we came to St. Louis----"

"Yes, ever since we came to this old city, where those two boys started
out West, before anybody knew what the West was or even where it was.
I've been talking to our boys about those boys! Rather I should say,
those two young gentlemen of our Army, over a hundred years ago--Captain
Meriwether Lewis and Captain William Clark."

His sister nodded gravely, "I know."

"What water has run by here, since 1804, in these two rivers, the
Mississippi and the Missouri! How the country has grown! How the world
has changed! And how we have forgotten!

"That's why I want to take them, even now, my dear sister, these young
Americans, over that very same old trail--not so long and hard and full
of d