hat wait until your return."

"If ever I do return," I added.

"True; but you can thank yourself that you are thrusting your head into
the noose, with your eyes open."

"Then Your Excellency gives me leave to join as a volunteer?"

"We shall see--we shall see."

"But, Your Excellency, a man likes time for preparations."

"That is your own affair, sir,--though I may say that, at present, I
feel disposed to grant you the favor. I shall let you know in good
time."

With this I was forced to be content. The General rose to enter his
office, with a pompous gesture of dismissal.

But upon my return to my friend's quarters, he and Mrs. Pike and
Lieutenant Wilkinson joined in assuring me that, since the General had
not refused me point blank, I had every reason to expect a favorable
decision.

CHAPTER XIV

THE LURE

It was well in line with the General's character that he kept me on
tenterhooks until the very afternoon before the intended day of
marching. Then, as it were at the eleventh hour, he included in his
written orders to Lieutenant Pike, to march the following day, a brief
paragraph to the effect that I was to accompany the expedition as a
volunteer surgeon.

Notwithstanding the orders of the General, we did not start in the
morning, but were forced to wait over until the fifteenth of July, owing
to the unreadiness of our savage charges, the Osage captives who had
been rescued from the Pottawattomies and who were to be returned to
their people under our escort.

The first stage of our journey, up the devious Osage River, was one
tedious to all and exceedingly laborious to those whose duties confined
them to the navigation of the boats. In confirmation I need only add
that the Summer was fast nearing its close before we arrived at the
Osage towns.

There, instead of the generosity which we had a right to expect from an
Indian tribe to whom we had restored so many members, we were delayed
many days by their ungrateful reluctance to supply us with horses, and
in the end obtained with greatest difficulty only a few of their least
desirable animals.

Yet, relieved of the boats and our Indian charges and possessed of these
few pack-beasts and saddle horses, our march on toward the Pawnee
Republic, when at last we did get under way again, soon carried us into
the prairie which lies westward of the three-hundred-mile belt of
half-forested lands along the Mississippi. We had come to that vast
exten