not a chief. I will show you!"

He caught the twists of good black Virginia tobacco tossed to him, and
cast the rope far from him upon the tawny flood of the Missouri. An
instant later the oars had caught the water and Cruzatte had spread
the bowsail of the barge. So they won through one more of the most
dangerous of the tribes against whom they had been warned.

"A near thing, Merne!" said Will Clark after a time. "There is some
mighty Hand that seems to guide us--is it not the truth?"

CHAPTER IV

THE CROSSROADS OF THE WEST

The geese were now indeed flying down the river, coming in long, dark
lines out of the icy north. Sometimes the sky was overcast hours at a
stretch. A new note came into the voice of the wind. The nights grew
colder.

Autumn was at hand. Soon it would be winter--winter on the plains. It
was late in October, more than five months out from St. Louis, when
Mr. Jefferson's "Volunteers for the Discovery of the West" arrived in
the Mandan country.

Long ago war and disease wiped out the gentle Mandan people. Today two
cities stand where their green fields once showed the first broken
soil north of the Platte River. But a century ago that region,
although little known to our government at Washington, was not unknown
to others. The Mandan villages lay at a great wilderness crossroads,
or rather at the apex of a triangle, beyond which none had gone.

Hereabout the Sieur de la Verendrye had crossed on his own journey of
exploration two generations earlier. More lately the emissaries of the
great British companies, although privately warring with one another,
had pushed west over the Assiniboine. Traders had been among the
Mandans now for a decade. Thus far came the Western trail from Canada,
and halted.

The path of the Missouri also led thus far, but here, at the
intersection, ended all the trails of trading or traveling white men.
Therefore, Lewis and Clark found white men located here before
them--McCracken, an Irishman; Jussaume, a Frenchman; Henderson, an
Englishman; La Roque, another Frenchman--all over from the Assiniboine
country; and all, it hardly need be said, excited and anxious over
this wholly unexpected arrival of white strangers in their own
trading-limits.

Big White, chief of the Mandans, welcomed the new party as friends,
for he was quick to grasp the advantage the white men's goods gave his
people over the neighboring tribes, and also quick to understand the
virtue