ell fed? Are you warm? Have you bodily
comforts? Have you physical well-being?

How can I answer all these questions? Yet they come to my
mind as I write.

Are you in the mountains? Were there, after all, those great
Stony Mountains of which men told fables? Have you found the
great unicorn or the mammoth or the mastadon which Mr.
Jefferson said you were likely to meet? Have you found the
dinosaur or the dragon or the great serpents of a foregone
day? Suppose you have. What do they weigh with me--with you?
Are they so much to you as you thought they would be? Is the
taste of all your triumphs so sweet as you have dreamed,
Meriwether Lewis?

Have you grown savage, my friend--have you come to be just a
man like the others? Tell me--no, I will not ask you! If I
thought you could descend to the lawless standard of the
wilderness--but no, I cannot think of that! In any case,
'tis too late now. You have not come back to me.

You see, I am writing not so much to implore you to return
as to reproach you for not returning. By the time this
reaches you, it will be too late in our plans. We could not
afford to wait months--three months, four, six--has it been
so long as that since you left us? If so, it is too late
now. If we have failed, why did we fail?

They told me--my father and his friends--and I told you
plainly, that if your expedition went on, then our plan must
fail. But now I must presume that you have succeeded, or by
this time are beyond the feeling of either success or
failure. If you have failed, it is too late for us to
succeed. If you have succeeded, then certainly we have
failed. As you read this, you may be doing so with hope. I,
who wrote it, will be sitting in despair.

Meriwether Lewis, come back to me, even so! It will be too
late for you to aid me. You will have ruined all our hopes.
But yours still will be the task--the duty--to look me in
the face and say whether you owe aught to me. Can I forgive
you? Why, yes, I could never do aught else than forgive. No
matter what you did, I fear I should forgive you. Because,
after all, my own wish in all this----

Ah! let me write slowly here, and think very carefully!

My greatest wish in this, greater than any ambition I had
for myself or my family--_