the sleeve. It was a bit of paper.

He halted, the old presentiment coming to his mind.

"Is Shannon here?" he asked of the man who had handed him the coat.
"He was to get my moccasins mended for me."

"No, captain, he is out with Captain Clark," replied Fields, the
Kentuckian.

"Very well--that will do, Fields."

Meriwether Lewis sat down again by his little fire, his last letter in
his hand. Gently he ran a finger along the seal--stooped over, kicked
together the embers of the fire, and saw scratched in the wax a
number. This was Number Three!

He did not open it for a time. He looked at it--no longer in dread,
but in eagerness. It seemed to him, indeed, as if the letter had come
in response to the outcry of his soul--that it really had dropped from
the sky, manna for a hungry heart. It was the absence of this which
had worn him thin, left him the shadow of the man he should have been.

Here, as he knew well, was one more summons to what seemed to him to
be a duty. And off to the west, shining cold in the night under the
stars, stood the mountains, beckoning. Which was the way?

He broke the seal slowly, with no haste, knowing that whatever the
letter said it could mean only more unhappiness to him. Yet he was
hungry for it as one who longs for a soothing drug.

He pushed together yet more closely the burning sticks of his little
fire and bent over to read. It was very little that he saw written,
but it spoke to him like a voice in the night:

Come back to me--ah, come back! I need you. I implore you to
return!

There was no address, no date, no signature. There was no means of
telling whence or how this letter had come to him, more than any of
the others.

Go back to her--how could he, now? It was more than a year since these
words had been written! What avail now, if he did return? No, he had
delayed, he had gone on, and he had cost her--what? Perhaps her
happiness as well as his own, perhaps the success of herself and of
many others, perhaps his own success in life. Against that, what could
he measure?

The white mountains on ahead made no reply to him. The stars glowed
cold and white above him, but they seemed like a thousand facets of
pitiless light turned upon his soul.

The quavering howl of a wolf on a near by eminence sounded like a
voice to him, mocking, taunting, fiendish. Never, it seemed to him,
had any man been thus unhappy. Even the wilderness had failed him! In
a land of de