Days and nights filled with the singing and muttering of my big brother!
And I would need only to close my eyes, and all about me would come and
go the ghosts of the mighty doers--who are my kin. Big men, bearded and
powerful, pushing up stream with the cordelle on their shoulders!
Voyageurs chanting at the paddles! Mackinaws descending with precious
freights of furs! Steamboats grunting and snoring up stream! Old forts
sprung up again out of the dusk of things forgotten, with all the old
turbulent life, where in reality to-day the plough of the farmer goes or
the steers browse! Forgotten battles blowing by in the wind! And from a
bluff's summit, here and there, ghostly war parties peering down upon
me--the lesser kin of their old enemies--taking a summer's outing where
of old went forth the fighting men, the builders of the unwritten epic!




CHAPTER II

SIXTEEN MILES OF AWE


Our party of three left the railroad at Great Falls, a good two-days'
walk up river from Benton, the head of Missouri River navigation, to
which point our boat material had been shipped and our baggage checked.

A vast sun-burned waste of buffalo-grass, prickly pears, and sagebrush
stretched before us to the north and east; and on the west the filmy
blue contour of the Highwoods Mountains lifted like sun-smitten thunder
clouds in the July swelter. One squinting far look, however, told you