was something good to eat, and
they offered to eat him.

"Their rifles were muzzle loaders--I've often and often tried to find
just the size ball they used, but I can't find such exact mention of
their weapons--but they were light and inefficient single-shot rifles,
as we now look at it, even in the hands of exact riflemen, as all those
men were. So the grizzlies jumped them. They shot one sixteen times.
Lewis had to jump in the river to escape from one. Oh, they had merry
times in those days, when grizzlies were regular fellows!"

John nearly always had precise facts at hand. He now found his copy of
the little journal of Patrick Gass. "Here's how big one was," he said.
"Gass calls it a 'very large brown bear,' and it measured three feet
five inches around the head, three feet eleven inches around the neck,
five feet ten and one-half inches around the breast. His foreleg was
twenty-three inches around, and his talons were four and three-eighths
inches. He was eight feet seven and one-half inches long."

"That was a big grizzly," Uncle Dick nodded, "a very big one, for this
latitude. The biggest silvertip grizzly I ever knew in Montana weighed
nine hundred pounds. But they were bigger in California and all up the
Pacific coast--trees and bears grew bigger there, for some reason. You
boys have killed Kadiaks as big as this Gass grizzly. But you didn't do
it with a flintlock, small-bore, muzzle loader, fair stand-up fight. And
your Kadiak bear would run when it saw you--so would a Lewis and Clark
grizzly; only it would run toward you! Six men of them went out after
one of them and wounded it, and it almost got the lot of them. Another
time a grizzly chased a man down a bank into the river--bad actors,
those grizzlies, in those times."

John looked at his watch. "Getting late, folks," said he. "On our way?"

"On our way!" And in a few moments the _Adventurer_ had her load aboard.

"You will now notice the Sioux running along the bank," said John,
"trailing the boat, shooting ahead of it, threatening to stop it,
begging tobacco, asking for a ride--all sorts of a nuisance. But we
spread the square sail, set out, and proceeded on!"

In fact, so well had they cast out ahead, as usual, the nature of the
country into which they were coming, and so well had they studied its
history, that it needs not tell their daily journey among the great
bluffs, the wide bars, and the willow-lined shores of the great river.

Gradually,