man seemed done
for; his face had all the features scraped off, and one of his legs went
wabbly when they lifted him.

It was merely a matter of one more man being dead, so the expedition
pushed on, leaving the young friend with several others to see the old
man under ground. But the old man was a fighter and refused to die,
though he was unconscious: held on stubbornly for several days, but it
seemed plain enough that he would have to let go soon. So the young
friend and the others left the old man in the wilderness to finish up
the job by himself. They took his weapons and hastened after the main
party, for the country was hostile.

But one day old Glass woke up and got one of his eyes open. And when he
saw how things stood, he swore to God he would live, merely for the sake
of killing his false friend. He crawled to a spring near by, where he
found a bush of ripe bull-berries. He waited day after day for strength,
and finally started out to _crawl_ a small matter of one hundred miles
to the nearest fort. And he did it, too! Also he found his friend after
much wandering--and forgave him.

Fancy AEschylus working up that story with the Furies for a chorus and
Nemesis appearing at intervals to nerve the old hero!

[Illustration: AFTER THE SPRING BREAK-UP.]

[Illustration: "HOLE-IN-THE-WALL" ON THE UPPER MISSOURI.]

[Illustration: PALISADES OF THE UPPER MISSOURI.]

And Rose the Renegade, who became the chief of a powerful tribe of
Indians! And Father de Smet, one of the noblest figures in history,
carrying the gospel into the wilderness! And Le Barge, the famous pilot,
whose biography reads like a romance! In the history of the Missouri
River there were hundreds of these heroes, these builders of the epic
West. Some of them were violent at times; some were good men and some
were bad. But they were masterful always. They met obstacles and
overcame them. They struck their foes in front. They thirsted in
deserts, hungered in the wilderness, froze in the blizzards, died with
the plagues, and were massacred by the savages. Yet they conquered.
Heroes of an unwritten epic! And their pathway to defeat and victory was
the Missouri River.

If you wish to have your epic spiced with the glamour of kings, the
history of the river will not fail you; for in those days there were
kings as well as giants in the land. Though it was not called such, all
the blank space of the map of the Missouri River country and even to the
Pac