"Very true," I a.s.sented. "Suppose, then, that I part company from you here, and strike out to cross my barrier alone?"

"No!" he exclaimed.

"Why not?"

"You surely would perish. I could not spare you a horse. We shall need all for the packs before the week is out. Without a horse, and alone, you surely would perish, either in this bleak desert or among those mountain wilds."

"Yet I am willing to chance it. I hoped to have crossed the barrier--to have reached her side--before now."

"If not for your own sake, John, then for ours! You are the best shot among us. Since Wilkinson left, you have in effect taken his place as second in command. You know how highly the men regard you. Should aught happen to me, you are the only one of our number capable of taking my place and carrying out the various objects of the expedition."

"Meek is a fine soldier," I said.

"A good sergeant and a brave man--so brave that we could count upon him to 'raise a little dust' at the first opportunity. He's brave to rashness, but quite incapable of keeping notes, either of our route or of the many scientific features which we are certain to encounter."

"Yet--to wait, it may be months longer!"

"We need you, John."

"Very well," I replied. I could not do other than give way to that argument.

Such was the quenching of my newly aroused hopes. I should cross the barrier to Alisanda; I vowed I would cross it, or die. But the attempt must now wait until we had penetrated to the headwaters of the Arkansas; until we had rounded the sources of the Red River,--if in truth we were ever to find the unknown upper reaches of that stream; until we had spent weeks, and it might be months, wandering about the snowy wildernesses of these vast Western mountains.

It was a sickening prospect for my eager love to contemplate. Yet I needed only the quiet words of my friend to realize what I already knew in my heart. It was true what he said. I could be of service to my comrades. There was my duty to them, if not my patriotism, to bind me to their company. I could not have left them at the time, even though the way to Santa Fe and on to Chihuahua had been an open highway before my feet, and the season midspring.

CHAPTER XVII

THE GRAND PEAK

The Lieutenant's prediction that the following evening should see us encamped at the foot of the Grand Peak was not borne out by the event.

Notwithstanding our many days on the prairies, we were yet far from realizing the deception of distances in this high alt.i.tude and clear, dry atmosphere.

That next day we lost many hours on a large fork of the river, where the turning of the Spanish trace led us to believe that the party had set off southward. Finding that they had returned and continued their ascent of the main stream, we did likewise. This gave us but little progress for that day.

But the next morning we set out, confident that we should reach the Grand Peak within a few hours. Our astonishment was great when, after marching nearly twenty-five miles, we found ourselves at evening seemingly no nearer the mountains than at sunrise. Yet we had thought to encamp at their base that night!

The following two days we spent in hunting buffalo and jerking the meat.

The marrow bones gave us a feast fit for a king,--fit even for citizens of the Republic.

The second day of our march onward, still keeping to the Spanish trace, we at last found ourselves appreciably nearing the mountains. What was not so welcome, we came upon the fresh traces of two Indians who had ascended the river very recently. Warned by this, we proceeded in the morning more than ever wary of ambuscades. There was good reason for our precautions.

Scarcely had the Lieutenant, Baroney, and myself ridden out in advance of the party, when of a sudden the interpreter sang out: "_Voila! Les sauvages!_"

A moment later we also caught sight of the Indians, a number of whom were circling about us on the high ground, while others raced directly upon us out of the dense groves of cottonwoods. All were afoot; which, taken with the unmistakable cut of their hair and their red and black paint, told us all too plainly that they were a war party of p.a.w.nees returning from an unsuccessful raid upon one of the Western tribes.

Knowing well how apt are the warriors to be evil-tempered after the humiliation of a failure to strike their enemy, I prepared to sell my life as dearly as might be. All the probabilities pointed to the supposition that the party was made up of Skidis, or Loups, and I, for one, had no desire to become a captive in their hands. It was enough to have escaped in my boyhood from the stake and fire of the Shawnees. I had no intention of now letting myself be crucified and mangled and burned as a sacrifice to the morning star by these prairie savages.

But Pike, cool as ever, restrained Baroney and myself from firing, and the Indians seemed to justify his moderation by flinging down their weapons and running to us with outstretched arms. In a moment they were all about us, in a jostling, jabbering crowd, patting and hugging us as though we had been blood kinsmen. So urgent were they with their friendly requests for us to dismount that we finally complied. On the instant an Indian was upon each horse and riding off.

Still the others held to their friendly gestures, and upon looking back, we could see the rest of their party making no less friendly demonstrations among our soldiers. We were partly rea.s.sured when we learned that the warriors were not Loups, but a party from the Grand p.a.w.nee. But the confirmation of our surmise that they were returning from an unsuccessful raid upon the Tetans, or Ietans,--whom the Spaniards call Comanches,--caused us to fall back upon our main party and work it around to a camp in a little grove as speedily as possible.

During this man[oe]uvre more than one of our unwelcome visitors bent their bows. But the firm insistence of our gallant leader won its way with the savages. Soon all sixty were seated about us in a ring. The Lieutenant then sat down opposite their chief, with the council pipe laid out before him.

At his orders, gifts of tobacco, knives, and flints were placed beside the chief. The present was greeted with guttural cries of dissatisfaction, and the chief demanded with great insolence that we should give them a quant.i.ty of our most valuable equipage, from ammunition to blankets and kettles. To this, despite the advice and even urgent plea of Baroney, our commander firmly refused to accede.

At last, after no little grumbling and threatening, they presented us with a vessel of water, and drank and smoked with us, in token of amity.

Not satisfied with this, and warned by Baroney, I kept on my feet, watching the treacherous warriors. Our wariness was justified by the contemptuous manner in which many of their number threw away their presents. When, immediately after this, we began to reload our pack horses, the entire band pressed into our midst and began to pilfer right and left.

For a time all was in the most perilous confusion, Pike and I having to mount our horses to save the very pistols in our holsters. On every side the savages were s.n.a.t.c.hing articles, which the soldiers were doing their best to wrest from them.

"The rogues!" cried Pike. "Baroney, command the chief to call off his men. I'll not submit to open robbery!"

Even while Baroney interpreted the order, the chief slipped a knife from the belt of one of the privates who was turned the other way, and hid it behind his shield. Almost in the same moment he faced the Lieutenant, and flung out his hand in a gesture of injured innocence.

Baroney hastily interpreted his ironic, hypocritical reply: "The great white chief has an open hand, a good heart. It cannot be he grudges his poor red friends a few small gifts. My braves are wretched; they are needy; they hunger."

"Hungry, are they?" shouted Pike. "Then we'll give them lead to eat!

Stand ready to fire, men!" He rose in his stirrups and pointed his pistol at the chief. "By the Almighty! I'll shoot the next scoundrel who touches our goods!"

I looked for an instant acceptance of the challenge. Intermingled among us as they were and so greatly superior in numbers, the savages had every advantage. In hand to hand fighting their clubs and knives and stone tomahawks would have been as efficient as our weapons, while our firearms, once emptied, would have taken us more time to reload than an Indian would require to shoot a quiverful of arrows.

For a long moment our fate hung in the balance, while the enraged pilferers gripped their weapons and glared at us with murderous hate.

The tense silence was broken only by the sharp clicking of our hammers.

Suddenly Sergeant Meek, far too well disciplined to fire without orders, yet unable to restrain his pugnacity, seized a brawny young warrior by the shoulder, and whirling him around like a child, sent him flying off with a tremendous kick.

"Begone, ye varmint!" he roared.

It was the last straw to the savages. Overawed by our unquailing boldness in the face of their superior numbers, they followed their staggering fellow, sullen and scowling, muttering threats, yet afraid to strike.

We waited with finger on trigger, until the last of their long file had glided beyond gunshot. Then the Lieutenant, half choking with rage, ordered us to take stock of our losses. It did not soothe him to find that the thieves had managed to make away with some thirty or forty dollars' worth of our property. Not even the ferocious Sioux and Chippewas had dared to rob him in this brazen fashion. But with only sixteen guns, all told, it was wiser for us to submit to the outrage than to imperil the expedition and perhaps lose our lives in an attempt to follow and punish the rascals.

That evening the Lieutenant and I went back and lay in wait beside our trace, thinking that the thieves might return and attempt to steal our horses. It would have been only too well in keeping with the habits of these savages, for the p.a.w.nees are the most noted horse-thieves of all the prairie tribes. Fortunately our watch proved needless.

By noon of the day after this encounter we came to the third large southern branch of the river, immediately beyond which a fork on the north bank ran off about northwest toward the Grand Peak which we had first sighted so far out on the prairies. As the Peak now seemed only a day's journey distant, the Lieutenant decided to attempt its ascent with a small party. But first we joined in erecting a breastwork,--the first American building in all this vast wilderness; the first structure south of the Missouri and west of the p.a.w.nee Republic to float the glorious Stars and Stripes!

Shortly after noon of the second day the Lieutenant marched for the peak with Miller, Brown, and myself.

Instead of reaching the foot of the peak by nightfall, as we had expected, we were compelled to camp under a cedar tree, out on the bleak prairie. Severe as was the cold, we felt still greater discomfort from the lack of water. Again we marched for the great mountain, in the fond expectation of encamping that night upon its summit. Instead, we hardly reached the base of the lofty rise. Fortunately we there found a number of springs, and succeeded in killing two buffaloes.

Still untaught by experience, we foolishly left our blankets and all other than a pocketful of provision at our bivouac, and set off up the mountain at dawn, a.s.sured that we could reach the top by noon and descend again by nightfall. Almost at the start I brought down a deer of a species unknown to us, it being larger than the ordinary animal, and its ears much like those of a mule. The carca.s.s was flayed without delay, and the skin hung well up in a pitch-pine, together with the saddle.

Made impatient by the delay, we began our climb with a will, determined to reach the summit even earlier than we had planned. In this, however, we were to be most sadly disappointed. After clambering up the steep slopes and precipices all day without arriving at the crest, we were forced to take refuge for the night in a cave. While preparing to creep into this cheerless shelter, our discomfort over the utter lack of blankets, food, and water was for the moment forgotten in the curious sensation of standing under a clear sky and gazing at a snowstorm far below us down the mountain.

Morning found us half famished with thirst and hunger and bruised by our rocky beds, but we needed no urging to resume our laborious ascent. The view from our lofty mountain side was the grandest I had ever seen.

Above us arched the translucent sky in an illimitable dome of purest sapphire, rimmed before our upturned eyes by gaunt, jagged rocks and fields of dazzling snow. Behind and below us the vast desert of prairies stretched away to east and north and south, far beyond the reach of human eye, its tawny surface closely overhung by a sea of billowy white clouds. Far to the south, at least a hundred miles distant, we noted in particular a vast double, or twin, peak, which stood out from and overtopped the heights of the front range even as our Grand Peak dwarfed its neighbors.