tinuing the brawl with Pierre. A knock at the
door would bring the amiable invitation to enter, and the two young men
would step across his threshold, while their followers crowded about the
open door and hailed the old pathfinder.

One of the two leaders--the dark slender man with a subtle touch of the
dreamer in his resolute face--was a stranger; but the other, with the
more practical mien and the shock of hair that gave him the name of Red
Head among the tribes, Boone had known as a lad in Kentucky. To Daniel
and this young visitor the encounter would be a simple meeting of
friends, heightened in pleasure and interest somewhat, naturally, by the
adventure in prospect. But to us there is something vast in the thought
of Daniel Boone, on his last frontier, grasping the hands of William
Clark and Meriwether Lewis.

As for the rough and hearty mob at the door, Daniel must have known not
a few of them well; though they had been children in the days when he
and William Clark's brother strove for Kentucky. It seems fitting that
the soldiers with this expedition should have come from the garrison at
Kaskaskia; since the taking of that fort in 1778 by George Rogers
Clark had opened the western way from the boundaries of Kentucky to the
Mississippi. And among the young Kentuckians enlisted by William Clark
were sons of the sturdy fighters of still an earlier border line, Clinch
and Holston Valley men who had adventured under another Lewis at Point
Pleasant. Daniel would recognize in these--such as Charles Floyd--the
young kinsmen of his old-time comrades whom he had preserved from
starvation in the Kentucky wilderness by the kill from his rifle as they
made their long march home after Dunmore's War.

In May, Lewis and Clark's pirogues ascended the Missouri and the leaders
and men of the expedition spent another day in La Charette. Once again,
at least, Daniel was to watch the westward departure of pioneers. In
1811, when the Astorians passed, one of their number pointed to the
immobile figure of "an old man on the bank, who, he said, was Daniel
Boone."

Sometimes the aged pioneer's mind cast forward to his last journey, for
which his advancing years were preparing him. He wrote on the subject
to a sister, in 1816, revealing in a few simple lines that the faith
whereby he had crossed, if not more literally removed, mountains was
a fixed star, and that he looked ahead fearlessly to the dark trail he
must tread by its single