when at length, freshened by his plunge,
he stood drying himself for dressing. Unconsciously, his arm extended,
he looked for all the world the very statue of the young Apoxyomenos
of the Vatican--the finest figure of a man that the art of antiquity
has handed down to us.

As that smiling youth out of the past stood, scraper in hand, drying
himself after the games, so now stood this young American, type of a
new race, splendid as the Greeks themselves in the immortal beauty of
life. His white body shining in the sun, every rolling muscle plainly
visible--even that rare muscle over the hip beloved of the ancients,
but now forgotten of sculptors, because rarely seen on a man today--so
comely was he, so like a god in his clean youth, that Patrick Gass,
unhampered by backwardness himself, turned to his new companions, whom
already he addressed each by his first name.

"George," said he to young Shannon, "George, saw ye ever the like of
yon? What a man! Lave I had knowed he could strip like yon, niver
would I have taken the chance I did last night. 'Tis wonder he didn't
kill me--in which case I'd niver have had me job. The Lord loves us
Irish, anny way you fix it!"

CHAPTER XII

CAPTAIN WILLIAM CLARK

"Will!"

"Merne!"

The two young men gripped hands as the great bateau swung inshore at
the Point of Rocks on the Kentucky side of the Ohio. They needed not
to do more, these two. The face of each told the other what he felt.
Their mutual devotion, their generosity and unselfishness, their
unflagging unity of purpose, their perfect manly comradeship--what
wonder so many have called the story of these two more romantic than
romance itself?

"It has been long since we met, Will," said Meriwether Lewis. "I have
been eating my heart out up at Pittsburgh. I got your letter, and glad
enough I was to have it. I had been fearing that I would have to go on
alone. Now I feel as if we already had succeeded. I cannot tell
you--but I don't need to try."

"And you, Merne," rejoined William Clark--Captain William Clark, if
you please, border fighter, leader of men, one of a family of leaders
of men, tall, gaunt, red-headed, blue-eyed, smiling, himself a
splendid figure of a man--"you, Merne, are a great man now, famous
there in Washington! Mr. Jefferson's right-hand man--we hear of you
often across the mountains. I have been waiting for you here, as
anxious as yourself."

"The water is low," complained Lewis, "and a th