w, as they huddled on the wet beach on which they disembarked, the
officers ordered the men to build but one fire, and that a large one.
Grouped about this they all stood, ragged, soaked, gaunt, unkempt, yet
the happiest company of adventurers that ever followed a long trail to
its end.

"Men," said Meriwether Lewis at length, "we have now arrived at the
end of our journey. In my belief there has never been a party more
loyal to the purpose on which it has been engaged. Without your
strength and courage we could not have reached the sea. It is my wish
to thank you for Mr. Jefferson, the President of the United States,
who sent us here. If at any time one of you has been disposed to
doubt, or to resent conditions which necessarily were imposed, let all
that be forgotten. We have done our work. Here we must pass the
winter. In the spring we will make quick time homeward."

They gave him three cheers, and three for Captain Clark. York gave
expression to his own emotions by walking about the beach on his
hands.

"And the confounded ships are all gone back to sea!" grumbled Patrick
Gass. "I've been achin' for days to git here, in the hope of foindin'
some sailor man I'd loike to thrash--and here is no one at all, at
all!"

"Will," said Meriwether Lewis after a time, pulling out the inevitable
map, "I wonder where it was that Alexander Mackenzie struck the
Pacific twelve years ago! It must have been far north of here. We have
come around forty-seven degrees of longitude west from Washington, and
something like nine degrees north unite with France or Spain on the
south to known exploration by land. We have driven the wedge home!
Never again can Great Britain on the north unite with France or Spain
on the south to threaten our western frontier. If they dispute the
title we purchased from Napoleon, they can never deny our claim by
right of discovery. This, I say, solidifies our republic! We have done
the work given us to do."

"Yes," grinned William Clark, standing on one leg and warming his wet
moccasin sole at the fire; "and I wonder where that other gentleman,
Mr. Simon Fraser, is just now!"

They could not know that Fraser, the trader who was their rival in the
great race to the Pacific, was at that time snow-bound in the Rockies
more than one thousand miles north of them.

Three years after the time when this little band of adventurers stood
in the rain at the mouth of the Columbia, Fraser, at the mouth of the
riv