The Magnificent Adventure - Emerson Hough (fiction books to read .txt) 📗
- Author: Emerson Hough
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There was no time to wait. The Blackfeet would be coming soon. Lewis abandoned his horses here. The entire party took to the boats, and hurried down the river as fast as they could, paddling in relays, day and night. Gaunt, eager, restless, moody, silent, their leader neither urged his men nor chided them, nor did he refer to the encounter with the Blackfeet. He did not need to, with Drouillard to describe it to them all a dozen times.
At times it was necessary for the boats to stop for meat, usually a short errand in a country alive with game; and, as was his custom, Lewis stepped ashore one evening to try for a shot at some near by game—elk, buffalo, antelope, whatever offered. He had with him Cruzatte, the one-eyed Frenchman. It was now that fortune frowned ominously almost for the first time.
The two had not been gone more than a few minutes when the men remaining at the boat heard a shot—then a cry, and more shouting. Cruzatte came running back to them through the bushes, calling out at the top of his voice:
“The captain! I’ve keeled him—I’ve keeled the captain—I’ve shot him!”
“What is that you’re saying?” demanded Patrick Gass. “If you’ve done that, you would be better dead yourself!”
He reached out, caught Cruzatte’s rifle, and flung it away from him.
“Where is he?” he demanded.
Cruzatte led the way back.
“I see something move on the bushes,” said he, “and I shoot. It was not elk—it was the captain. Mon Dieu, what shall we do?”
They found Captain Lewis sitting up, propped against a clump of willows, his legging stripped to the thigh. He was critically examining the path of the bullet, which had passed through the limb. At seeing him still alive, his men gave a shout of joy, and Cruzatte received a parting kick from his sergeant.
There were actual tears in the eyes of some of the men as they gathered around their commander—tears which touched Meriwether Lewis deeply.
“It is all right, men!” said he. “Do not be alarmed. Do not reprove the man too much. The sight of a little blood should not trouble you. We are all soldiers. This is only an accident of the trail, and in a short time it will be mended. See, the bone is not broken!”
They aided him back to the boats and made a bed upon which he might lie, his head propped up so that he could see what lay ahead. Other men completed the evening hunt, and the boats hurried on down the river. The next day found them fifty miles below the scene of the accident.
“Sergeant,” said Meriwether Lewis, “the natural fever of my wound is coming on. Give me my little war-sack yonder—I must see if I can find some medicine.”
Gass handed him his bag of leather, and Lewis sought in it for a moment. His hand encountered something that crinkled in the touch—crinkled familiarly! For one instant he stopped, his lips compressed as if in bodily pain.
It was another of the mysterious letters!
Before he opened it, he looked at it, frowning, wondering. Whence came these messages, and how, by whose hand? All of them must have been written before he left St. Louis in May of 1804. Now it was August of 1806. There was no human agency outside his own party that could have carried them. How had they reached him? What messenger had brought them? He forgot the fever of his wound in another and greater fever which arose in his blood.
He was with his men now, their eyes were on him all the time. What should he do—cast this letter from him into the river? If he did so, he felt that it would follow him mysteriously, pointing to the corpus delicti of his crime, still insistent on coming to the eye!
His men, therefore, saw their leader casually open a bit of paper. They had seen him do such things a thousand times, since journals and maps were a part of the daily business of so many of them. What he did attracted no attention.
Captain Lewis would have felt relieved had it attracted more. Before he read any of the words that lay before him, in this same delicate handwriting that he knew so well, he cast a slow and searching gaze upon the face of every man that was turned toward him. In fact, he held the letter up to view rather ostentatiously, hoping that it would evoke some sign; but he saw none.
He had not been in touch with the main party for more than a month. He had with him nine men. Which of these had secretly carried the letter? Was it Gass, Cruzatte, Drouillard, Reuben Fields, or McNeal?
He studied their faces alternately. Not an eyelash flickered. The men who looked at him were anxious only for his comfort. There was no trace of guilty knowledge on any of these honest countenances before him, and he who sought such admitted his own failure. Meriwether Lewis lay back on his couch in the boat, as far as ever from his solution of the mystery.
After all, mere curiosity as to the nature of that mystery was a small matter. It seemed of more worth to feel, as he did, that the woman who had planned this system of surprises for him was one of no ordinary mind. And it was no ordinary woman who had written the words that he now read:
Sir and My Friend:
Almost I am in despair. This is my fifth letter; you receive it, perhaps, some months after your start. I think you would have come back before now, if that had been possible. I had no news of you, and now I dread news. Should you still be gone a year from the time I write this, then I shall know that you were dead. Dead? Yes, I have written that word!
The swift thought comes to me that you will never see this at all—that it may, it must, arrive too late. Yet I must send it, even under that chance. I must write it, though it ruin all my happiness. Shall it come to you too late, others will take it to my husband. Then this secret—the one secret of my life—will be known. Ah, I hope this may come to your eyes, your living eyes; but should it not, none the less I must write it.
What matter? If it should be read by any after your death, that would be too late to make difference with you, or any difference for me. After that I should not care for anything—not even that then others would know what I would none might ever know save you and my Creator, so long as we both still lived.
This wilderness which you love, the wilderness to which you fled for your comfort—what has it done for you? Have you found that lonely grave which is sometimes the reward of the adventurer thither? If so, do you sleep well? I shall envy you, if that is true. I swear I often would let that thought come to me—of the vast comfort of the plains, of the mountains—the sweep of the untiring winds, sweet in the trees and grasses—or the perpetual sound of water passing by, washing out, to the voice of its unending murmurs, all memory of our trials, of our sins.
What need now to ask you to come back? What need to reproach you any further? How could I—how can I—with this terrible thought in my soul that I am writing to a man whose eyes cannot see, whose ears cannot hear?
Still, what difference, whether or not you be living? Have not your eyes thus far been blind to me? Have not your ears been deaf to me, even when I spoke to you direct? It was the call of your country as against my call. Was ever thinking woman who could doubt what a strong man would do? I suppose I ought to have known. But oh, the longing of a woman to feel that she is something greater in a man’s life even than his deeds and his ambitions—even than his labors—even than his patriotism!
It is hard for us to feel that we are but puppets in the great game of life, of so small worth to any man. How can we women read their hearts—what do we know of men? I cannot say, though I am a married woman. My husband married me. We had our honeymoon—and he went away about the business of his plantations. Does every girl dream of a continuous courtship and find a dull answer in the facts? I do not know.
How freely I write to you, seeing that you are blind and deaf, of that wish of a woman to be the one grand passion of a strong man’s life—above all—before even his country! What may once have been my own dream of my capacity to evoke such emotions in the soul of any man I have flung into the scrap-heap of my life. The man, the one man—no! What was I saying, Meriwether Lewis, to you but now, even though you were blind and deaf? I must not—I must not!
Nay, let me dream no more! It is too late now. Living or dead, you are deaf and blind to all that I could ever do for you. But if you be still living, if this shall meet your living eyes, however cold and clear they may be, please, please remember it was not for myself alone that I took on the large ambitions of which I have spoken to you, the large risks engaged with them. Nay, do not reproach me; leave me my woman’s right to make all the reproaches. I only wanted to do something for you.
I have not written so freely to any man in all my life. I could not do so now did I not feel in some strange way that by this time—perhaps at this very time—you are either dead or in some extreme of peril. If I knew that you would see this, I could not write it. As it is, it gives me some relief—it is my confessional. How often does a woman ever confess her own, her inner and real heart? Never, I think, to any man—certainly not to any living, present man.
I married; yes. It seemed the ordinary and natural thing to do, a useful, necessary, desirable thing to do. I should not complain—I did that with my eyes well opened and with full counsel of my father. My eyes well opened, but my heart well closed! I took on my duties as one of the species human, my duties as wife, as head of a household, as lady of a certain rank. I did all that, for it is what most women would do. It is the system of society. My husband is content.
What am I writing now? Arguing, justifying, defending? Ah, were it possible that you would read this and come back to me, never, never, though it killed me, would I open my heart to you! I write only to a dead man, I say—to one who can never hear. I write once more to a man who set other things above all that I could have done. Deeds, deeds, what you call your country—your own impulses—these were the things you placed above me. You placed above me this adventuring into the wilderness. Yes, I know what are the real impulses in your man’s life. I know what you valued above me.
But you are dead! While you lived, I hoped your conscience was clean. I hope that never once have you descended to any conduct not belonging to Meriwether Lewis
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