As the crow flies

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Chapter I “can A Man Buy Running Water?”

The line of tents under the cottonwood trees stood white and hot under the blazing sunshine of a summer afternoon. Not even the big river, sliding past the encampment in a mile-wide expanse of muddy, brown water, could ccol the heavy, lifeless air, but only gave back the heat in a reflected glare of fierce brightness. The lightly hung leaves of the cottonwoods, so easily swung by the veriest breath of passing wind, were motionless now. Only the feathery green of the willows along the shore looked soft and cool; yet even here was witness of the merciless power of the sun. The river had shrunk away from its usual waterline, which ordinarily washed the roots of the willows, and showed now a wide band of bare mud, dried and cracked into a thousand fantastic patterns. The long keel boat, lying at the water’s edge, was half its length out of water, so far had the river drawn away since first it had been moored there.

Quiet and languor prevailed almost everywhere on that long summer afternoon in August of the year eighteen hundred and five. Only within the first tent of the row was a scene very different;

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for here a young officer was throwing together his possessions in such breathless haste as seemed to take no account of the heat which was fairly stifling under the dusty canvas.

“Can you not hurry a little, Tryon?” he kept saying to the tall orderly who was assisting him; yet he was forced to add, every few minutes, “Have you seen my second blunderbuss? There should be a bag of heavy rifle balls here somewhere. I have mislaid the bundle of quills for pens.”

Big Michael Tryon required no urging to make haste. He was so large that he seemed to half fill the narrow space within the tent; but he moved about with the easy precision of a soldier long used to the cramped quarters of army life. He produced, without trouble, the missing blunderbuss and the mislaid sheaf of quills; he rolled and roped the bundles of blankets, saying little and accomplishing far more than his headlong superior. The young Lieutenant began to change hastily into his dress uniform, all the while looking wistfully at the buckskin shirt and big boots laid ready for him. Under the camp table, a small dog had taken refuge, a curly black spaniel. He regarded his master’s every move with intent eyes, but wisely kept from under his hurrying feet.

Michael gave a last loving rub to the burnished sword and held up the much-braided coat. The young man’s fingers were stumbling among the buttons as he strove to fasten them.

“Ts there really need of such haste, sir?” Michael Tryon ventured to protest in his deep, rumbling voice. “That big river out yonder has been running for a long age past, waiting for you to come and seek out whence it flows. It can surely wait, without disaster, for a few hours more.”

The tone of respectful affection and the officer’s answering smile told plainly that these two were comrades-in-arms of long standing. Ever since Zebulon Pike, at the age of fifteen, had begun a soldier’s life in his father’s regiment, Michael Tryon, a grizzled war-worn veteran even then, had taken especial charge of him. Among winding trails, frontier posts and Indian skirmishes all up and down the Ohio and Cumberland valleys, these two had marched and camped and fought in such close companionship that half of the young officer’s knowledge of military arts was drawn from the storehouse of the old private’s vast and rough experience. In contrast to his tall, gray-headed Irish orderly, the Lieutenant, very slim and very fair, looked even younger than the years which he actually possessed.

At the old soldier’s protest, he restrained a little of his excited hurry; but he shook his head with energy as he answered.

“The river can wait, but I cannot. There has been such endless talk over this matter, such dragging preparation, that I begin to believe the broad Mississippi will fairly run dry before we are able to set off.”

“Tt cannot be long now,” Michael replied, “and the big river is yet running fairly full, a mile of water, at least, from bank to bank. She is calling to you even now.”

Both were silent for a moment to listen to that low-pitched, deeply-murmuring voice which could always be heard as the background of all smaller, shriller noises of the camp, the sound of a vast flood of waters moving with steady, enormous power, onward and onward forever.

Except for the river, the hot world outside was very still. Along the white road, under an almost blinding sun, three mules were shambling lazily, their hoofs stepping softly in the deep dust which rose and hung above them in a long cloud. The faint jingle-jangle of the leader’s bell came slowly nearer, accompanied now and again by the drowsily urging voice of the driver who bestrode the hindmost of the three.

“Yonder come our beans and flour and bacon,” announced Lieutenant Pike. “There is now but one thing more to do, to ride into St. Louis and receive General Wilkinson’s written orders, which he says are finally ready. I will need less than an hour to go thither, if I make haste, and less than an hour to return. Perhaps I must spend with him the space Of =e

He stopped for a moment to reflect. In spite of the look of anxiety upon his hard, sunburned face, Michael Tryon’s countenance relaxed into a smile which he sought to conceal by stooping over the roll of blankets.

“The General cannot keep me more than a few minutes,” Pike concluded. “After all the talk there has been in this matter, there surely is nothing further to say. Tell Kennerman and the men to be ready in two hours’ time, Tryon, and have my horse brought. See that the mules are unloaded the moment they reach the camp. Bid everyone make haste.”

Michael Tryon was a soldier faithful to duty; but in spite of that, when his young superior had galloped off in a rolling cloud of dust, he took a most leisurely way to the next tent and told Sergeant Kennerman that “the Lieutenant says he will be here again in two hours, but you know what chance he has when the General begins to talk. It will be two hours and more before old Windbags has done with him, and then it will be too late to set forth on this day. You can yet hope to sleep another night under canvas, Henry Kennerman, though it will break the young lad’s heart to be kept waiting.”

It was the expedition for the first exploration of the upper Mississippi upon which Zebulon Pike and his command of twenty men were about to embark. Two years before, after long negotiation, there had been concluded an historic bargain between a long, lean, grave American President and a small, energetic, and fantastically ambitious French Emperor, that transaction known as the Louisiana Purchase. Just what he had bought or how great was the extent of the new domain, neither President Jefferson nor anyone else could really tell. All that anyone knew was that he had purchased two great rivers and the lands pertaining to them. It was necessary to discover from what source these rivers came and who dwelt upon their banks. Already one exploring party had set out, in the spring of the year before, to examine the lands and the peoples of the valley of the Missouri. Zebulon Pike had watched with envy the departure of Captains Lewis and Clark, and he had thought of them often as far advanced into the wilderness, while he fumed and fretted in his own great desire to be gone.

Of the Mississippi, whose headwaters he was to seek out, there was not much more known than of the Missouri. Reports came, through traders, that above the pouring in of the Missouri’s muddy flood, the Mississippi was a clear, winding stream, draining a land of high bluffs and green prairies and that, far to the north, it flowed out of a limitless forest. The Sioux Indians dwelt upon its banks, and the Sac-and-Fox tribes, while farther yet to the northward dwelt the Chippeway, a fierce woodland race of which scarcely anything was known save that they were desperate fighters. Hidden also in those far woods were other enemies of the new Government, Frenchmen and British subjects, who had established intercourse with the Indians and were carrying home to their own countries the profits of a great fur trade. They were, as well, stirring up the red men to ever-renewed enmity against the people of the United States.

Whoever went exploring thither in the name of President Jefferson was directed to make peace treaties with the Indians, any Indians, all Indians whom he should chance to meet, a somewhat difficult mission for an untried officer who knew nothing of their ways or the languages of any of them. He was, moreover, to establish the authority of the United States over those British trading posts which had considered themselves to be safely hidden in the dense northern forests. And he was to seek out the sources of the Mississippi and find thus the northern limits of the new possessions, determining from what cradle sprang this giant among rivers. It was the last errand which appealed the most vividly to the questing heart of Zebulon Pike.

The preparations had dragged for months; but even the slowest things come finally to an end. There was no one wise enough to know that the expedition was planning to set forth in the wrong sort of boat, at the worst time of year, with insufficient equipment, and with no definitely thought-out plans. Men higher in command than Lieutenant Pike had decreed the time and the manner of his going; while he himself was cheerfully unaware of the faulty arrangements. No one, save a handful of French traders and a number of completely silent Indians, was really familiar with the upper Mississippi, and these would say nothing, since they had no wish to see the expedition succeed.

“Let the new masters take possession of the river as best they can,” was the whispered opinion which went from one to another of those who knew of the enterprise and who were learned enough in wood and water lore to see how blindly the arrangements were being made. The difficulties and dangers were doubled and trebled by the scanty knowledge of all who had to do with the undertaking; but of such matters the young commander thought not at all. He knew little of Indians, since the mere practice of fighting red men gives small knowledge of their real nature. He knew less of the river; but his one idea, after all this heartbreaking delay, was to go forward.

Zebulon Pike came galloping at hot speed into the town, protesting under his breath when he was forced to check his horse in the narrow streets which were filled with a bustling procession of carts, mules, busy merchants hurrying about their business, tall, free-striding Indians in blankets and feathers, and bent squaws with deerskin packs or papooses hanging from their shoulders. Only a few years before, St. Louis had been the little trading post of Laclede’s Village, but it was already becoming a busy, crowded, frontier city into which rolled the great fur trade of all the great new West.

As the Lieutenant brought his horse to a halt before one of the few substantial houses of the hastily built town, he was forced, in spite of his haste, to stop for an instant’s admiring inspection of an Indian who was just passing. He was tall, vigorous, and graceful, with clean-cut features and the splendid, easy stride of unhampered strength. The dyed feathers in his hair, the bright-beaded moccasins upon his feet, the proud swing of his gay blanket made him a picture not easily to be passed by. He himself had paused for a moment to speak to Pierre Choteau, a slim Frenchman, the enterprising grandson of that first fur trader who had brought prosperity to St. Louis. The Indian was evidently a familiar friend of the young merchant, for he spoke easy French to him. Few of his race cared to learn any tongue but their own, and such as did would never willingly speak it except to some trusted intimate.

It seemed that Choteau had been trying to explain to a somewhat bewildered Indian mind the facts of the Louisiana Purchase, for Pike caught such words as “treaty with France and Spain,” and “taken over the valleys of the Mississippi and Missouri.”

The tall Indian threw up his hand in a vivid gesture of disdain. “Can a man buy running water?” he exclaimed and strode away.

Choteau, left behind, nodded greeting to Lieutenant Pike and smiled broadly.

“That is as near as they can come to understanding our change of government,” he said. “French, Spanish, Americans, it means little to them who holds dominion over the country which they are all sure is theirs alone. A strange, silent people; they know a thousand things which we could never guess at; and they fail to understand the simplest matters which we attempt to teach them.”

Zebulon Pike looked after the stately, disappearing figure as the Indian swung down the street.

“T should like to understand them,” he declared. “T could ask for little more, on this journey of mine, than to come back feeling that I had made a few such men to be my friends.”

“You ask for more than you think,” replied Choteau. “My grandfather. my father, and I, we have all gathered knowledge of them and yet find them a mystery still. When it comes to gifts and trinkets, they are like children; when it comes to fighting, they are like wild animals; when it comes to their dignity and their own sense of honor, they are, in pride, like princes of the blood royal.”

He had begun to walk on but looked over his shoulder to say, “The fellow is right. Monsieur Jefferson thinks he has bought two rivers, yet they will never be his or yours until you have conquered them. You will have to conquer them not by force of arms, but by slow knowledge of the secrets of their forests, of the peoples on their banks, of the ways of the rivers themselves. I wish you good luck in your attempt to solve the riddles of that baffling Mississippi.”

As Zebulon Pike entered the big, white house, so peremptory were his demands upon the ceremonious orderly stationed at the inner door, that he was brought immediately into the presence of General Wilkinson. The signed orders were actually handed to him at last; and now it seemed that one more moment of delay would be the very death of him. Yet, just as Michael Tryon had guessed and had betrayed the knowledge with an ill-concealed grin, the restless Lieutenant was obliged to remain for the whole of a desperate hour, sitting uneasily across the table from the General, listening respectfully to what his commander had to say.

He had long cherished a great, almost a worshipful, regard for his superior officer, General Wilkinson, whom he deemed a very able and a very brave soldier. This regard was not shared by the older sergeants and corporals, by the scarred and veteran privates, who had seen more of soldiering than had their Lieutenant. General Wilkinson had ° served through the Revolution; and so had these battered warriors, who, at night, beside their fires, passed tales of the doughty commander which that gentleman would have been little pleased to overhear. Never before, even in his inmost thoughts, had Pike voiced even the breath of a criticism of his -much-admired superior. But today, in his chafing impatience, there grew up within him the irresistible idea that the General was a man of over-many words. And how could it be otherwise when his final instructions were at last in his pocket and when there lay so immediately before him the beginning of his great enterprise. All that General Wilkinson had to say seemed small and inadequate beside the soaring hopes that filled his heart. Behind all those long, easily flowing sentences with which the General was discussing Mr. Jefferson’s great purchase, Zebulon Pike’s mind kept coming back to the Indian’s brief, keen summary, “Can a man buy running water?”

The big room was cool by reason of its generous space and long shuttered windows, but it could not relieve the hot unrest within him. General Wilkinson, offering him a tinkling glass of cool refreshment which Pike was too impatient to taste, General Wilkinson, talking on in a monotonous flow of high-sounding words, seemed, for once, to be a far lesser man than his young admirer had so long considered him. It appeared, indeed, that he would never have done. The General was not giving any final instructions, for it was plain that he had none to give. He was merely going over certain anecdotes concerning his own part in various public matters, telling casually of incidents in which the wisdom and prowess of General Wilkinson, so he modestly admitted, had snatched victory from the very jaws of disaster.

“Has he forgotten that I have heard that one before?” reflected Zebulon Pike and immediately reproached himself for such a comment, even within his own mind.

Yet it did seem that the General, usually so skillful with words, had begun to repeat himself, that he was, for once, over-eager to impress his listener. It was as though he cared little what was before his companion but that he wished, above all things, to have Lieutenant Pike carry with him into the wilderness a vivid impression of how great, how brave, and how wise was the man who had sent him. Pike, looking at him across the table, thought suddenly that General Wilkinson’s face looked strained. It was a handsome face; yet the younger man could not forbear noticing that it had grown, lately, a thought too fat, a shade too red. Once more he reproached himself harshly. Then, since there came a moment of silence, a pause which might be taken for a signal of dismissal, he got up hastily.

ae General observed him with a faintly bitter smile.

“I see that you will not dally upon your way,” he said.

The young officer was now in too great a hurry to notice that bitterness.

“T feel that it is most important for us to set out,” he replied simply. “I hope to be off before sundown.”

The great man arose also from his chair, and, with his most gracious manner of dignity and condescension and with some real affection, which that grand manner could not entirely hide, he shook hands with his young Lieutenant.

“T wish you the fairest of fortunes,” he said.

Lieutenant Pike muttered some stumbling words to voice his loyalty, his admiration, and his determination to offer the best that was within him. Then he was away across the long room, striding with such haste that he almost collided, at the door, with a tall and richly dressed gentleman who had been awaiting his turn to speak to General Wilkinson.

Once in the anteroom, however, Pike stopped to make sure that those precious orders, which had seemed to be burning his pocket for the last hour, were actually safe. The door was just closing, and he heard the General’s voice, dry, cold, and matter-of-fact.

“Tf he comes back, he can be made of great use to us.”

Of whom were they speaking, he wondered for an instant; could it be of himself? He wasted small thought upon that puzzle, for his mind was far too full of things of greater moment, while he ran, two steps at a time, down the stairs to where his horse was waiting before the door. It was five miles to the camp and well after noon already. But at last he was done with orders and instructions, with waiting upon the will of other people, and could now go forward at his own will.

He stopped in a narrow street of shops, sleepy in the merciless heat, and bargained for some last articles of which he suddenly remembered the need. The drowsy proprietor looked somewhat astonished at some of the items on the list.

“Ten pounds of vermillion coloring?” he said incredulously and added with frank willingness to’ offer advice, “For a man who is going to treat with the Indians there is but one thing to carry—rum, and more rum, and then more rum yet.”

“T purpose to try a different plan,” returned Pike stiffly and went on to the next articles upon the list.

The man of the shop assured him that the commodities would be sent to the camp immediately, but Pike, made wise by past experience, waited to see the mule loaded and actually started upon the way before he mounted his horse again. Even that would not have been accomplished without the magic influence of a gold piece, offered as an inducement beyond the ordinary price, and produced from the very slender wealth of the Lieutenant’s private treasury. The proprietor took it rather suspiciously and rung it upon the counter to make sure that the coin was genuine. The rich, golden jingle seemed to satisfy him, for a broad smile spread across his lean countenance. The musical sound also galvanized into life the black-faced mule driver, nodding in his tilted chair outside the door, and even seemed to arouse the slumbering mule, tied in a small spot of shade beyond the door of the shop. Both appeared to answer instantly to that delicious sound; for they started out of their August-afternoon stupor and set off, almost willingly, down the crooked street, across the white, hot, empty square and turned into the riverside road which led to the camp.

Having seen them thus far upon their way, Zebulon Pike left them to gallop forward, to fling himself from his horse at the door of his tent, and to call loudly for Michael. ‘

“We are going,” he cried. “Is Kennerman ready? Ts the boat pushed out? The orders are in my pocket; the General has—has come to an end of his instructions at last, and we are off.”

“When?” cried Michael in sharp surprise. “It is only four hours to sunset. It is Friday! Surely you are not going to set forth today?”

“When?” repeated Pike. ‘Why now, to be sure.” He repeated the word exultingly. “Now! Presidents, Emperors, Kings—and Generals, they have all had their say; but the talk and the preparations are at last come to an end.”

He began to divest himself of his uniform, while Michael stepped forward to take the sword so hastily unbuckled and to fold the gold-laced coat so vehemently cast aside. The black spaniel, still remaining under the table, began to fidget and whine, as though becoming almost unbearably anxious lest these preparations might mean that he was to be left behind.

The men, in the nearby tents, having received the order for immediate departure, were making less hasty preparation. Some were eager, some were grumbling; but none were anxious to come out, any sooner than was necessary, into the white glare of sunshine which lay upon the open spaces of the river bank.

Michael Tryon was packing the discarded uniform among the blankets, with a look in his eyes scarcely different from the dumb anxiety of the little dog. Once or twice he opened his lips to speak, then closed them firmly as if in the knowledge that it was of no use. But at length, when the final roll had been tied, when the last buckle had been strapped, while Lieutenant Pike was buckling on the big hunting knife which was to replace his sword, Michael, suddenly, could be silent no longer.

“An army would scarce be safe where you are going,” he said, the words seeming to break from him by the force of deep feeling, “and yet the General is sending you with only twenty men.”

“With ninetzen, besides myself,” corrected Pike. “That is the true difficulty which troubles you so greatly, my poor Michael.” He had fastened the knife and now took up the big pistols which lay upon the table. ‘Were it twenty-one men who were going, then the whole matter would appear in a greatly altered light. Were Private Michael Tryon, of the army of the United States, to be a member of the company, there would be no more warnings, no dark hints of unknown dangers! Is it not so?”

Michael nodded sheepishly. By definite orders from General Wilkinson, only young men were to be of that party, which was to endure toil, privation, and long marches beyond even the ordinary practice. Therefore Michael, who could not conceal the fact of his thirty-five years’ service as a fighting man, could not hope to be of the number. He still clung, however, to a last, desperate hope.

“You could easily find room for another,” he urged, in final, frantic pleading. ‘Twenty-one is not much more than twenty, in a seventy-foot boat. Oh, sir, could it not be that even yet, you might manage to take me with you?”

With a look of infinite regret, Zebulon Pike shook his head.

“Not this time, Michael,” he said, as gently as though the battered old warrior were a child pleading for some indulgence which was not for his own good.

“And will there ever be another time?” cried Michael desperately. “Shall we ever march or camp or fight in company again? You need me, sir, you know that you have need of me.”

The affection and comradeship bred of many hard years of toil together, was in the smile which young Pike gave him.

“An officer always needs faithfulness and friendship and loyalty,” he said. “But orders are orders, and I must even go forward with less of all those three, than I would have if you were there.”

Michael shook his head in helpless protest. As he spoke again, there fell from him, unwittingly, that same phrase which General Wilkinson had used.

“Tf you come back,” he said, “you will admit that you did not do well in leaving me behind.”

If Lieutenant Pike heard that “if,” it did not, even now, make any impression upon his tense mind. He had no need to answer, for the very tone of Michael’s voice was quite without hope. The old soldier flung a roll of bedding over his shoulder, took up a bale of other luggage in each hand, and stooped to the opening of the tent.

“The mule has just come in from St. Louis,” he announced, “and I see Bradley carrying the bale down to the boat.”

“Ask Bradley to see that everything is aboard,” replied the Lieutenant from within. “Tell Kennerman to call out the men‘and get the boat afloat. Can you take this extra musket?” He spoke to the waiting dog, whose suspense had now reached an agonizing pitch, but who still did not stir from his place.

“Come, Pluto,” he said.

The spaniel, with a succession of rapturous yelps, came charging out from under the table, to leap and bark about his master and then to race down to the boat. Michael regarded the delighted dog with a bitterly jealous eye.

“Him to be going, and me to stop here!” he muttered. But he had made his final plea and did not, now, protest aloud.

The last bales, boxes, and kegs were loaded into the long keel boat. The men gathered; the three hunting dogs were got aboard; the heavy craft was shoved out until she swung lightly in the current. Lieutenant Pike, laden with his final and most precious possessions, embarked the last but one, for the black spaniel jumped aboard behind him. A cluster of soldiers stood on the bank to watch them go, but there was no ceremony of departure. The young commander ordered briefly,

“Push off,” and the long, heavily laden vessel was on its way.

The air above the wide water quivered with the still heat, as the boat came drifting out into the current. She felt the tremendous force of the stream and dropped down a few yards as the men dug their oars into the water; then she began to respond to the pull of eighteen stout rowers; she gathered way and sent out a sharp arrowhead of ripples from each side of her prow. Thus she commenced to draw steadily away upon her journey, while those who were left behind watched her dwindle, until the flash of oars could no longer be distinguished, until she had become a mere dancing dot upon the wide, muddy waters, breasting the current on her way toward unknown lands.

Lieutenant Zebulon Pike felt his surging impatience dropping away at the moment that the boat began to move forward beneath him. He had given the tiller into the hands of Sergeant Kennerman, and was pulling an oar amongst the rowers. He could feel his vessel straining against the strength of the stream and gathering more and more speed as the blades began to swing steadily together. His surging impulse for haste grew less and less as he pulled with long, regular strokes, as mile after mile of the big river fell behind them. The fierce heat of the sun grew milder; the quivering air began to cool; the welcome twilight finally came stealing over the water. They had long since lost sight of the encampment and of the sparse dwellings which were scattered here and there along the shore for the first dozen miles. -