lar, and carved his name upon the yielding sandstone, where his bold lettering is visible yet to-day.
More and more distant each day grew the Rockies, etched fainter each night on the dim horizon of the west. More and more numerous grew the buffaloes, delaying the boats with their countless herds stampeding across the Yellowstone. For an hour one day the boats waited, the wide river blackened by their backs, and before night two other herds, as numerous as the first, came beating across the yellow-brown tide.
But more than buffaloes held sway on the magic Yellowstone. Wrapped in their worn-out blankets the men could not sleep for the scourge of mosquitoes; they could not sight their rifles for the clouds of moving, whizzing, buzzing, biting insects. Even the buffalo were stifled by them in their nostrils.
Nine hundred miles now had they come down the Yellowstone, to its junction with the Missouri half a mile east of the Montana border, but no sign yet had they found of Lewis. Clark wrote on the sand, "W. C. A few miles further down on the right hand side."
August 8, Sergeant Pryor and his companions appeared in their little skin tubs. Four days later, there was a shout and waving of caps,—the boats of Captain Lewis came in sight at noon. But a moment later every cheek blanched with alarm.
"Where is Captain Lewis?" demanded Clark, running forward.
There in the bottom of a canoe, Lewis lay as one dead, pale but smiling. He had been shot. With the gentleness of a brother Clark lifted him up, and they carried him to camp.
"A mistake,—an accident,—'tis nothing," he whispered.
And then the story leaked out. Cruzatte, one-eyed, near-sighted, mistaking Lewis in his dress of brown leather for an elk, had shot him through the thigh. With the assistance of Patrick Gass, Lewis had dressed the wound himself. On account of great pain and high fever he slept that night in the boat. And now the party were happily reunited.
