Scarcely a quarter of a century had passed since Napoleon had sold to the United States “Louisiana,” the French territory stretching from the Mississippi westward to the Rockies, and from the Gulf of Mexico northward to Canada; a buffer against the British which Napoleon himself could not hold and sold for a song. France had counted on Spain’s keeping the American colonists out of the West, and had secretly ceded her vast territory to the Spanish crown, but British traders from Montreal dispatched their bateaux down the Mississippi and up the Des Moines and Arkansas Rivers, undisturbed by the Spanish galleys sent against them. Spain abandoned the land she could not hold. She thrust it back upon France, busy with the wars that Napoleon provided for her at home. Hence New Orleans became an American port. The mouths of the mighty Mississippi were no longer closed to the ships of the United States. The inland empire which the great stream watered, bottled up no longer by the Spanish and French, was filling rapidly with the land-hungry settlers of the new United States. It was less than fifty years since the Revolutionary War, and yet already the thirteen original Colonies had expanded across the Alleghanies, west to the Mississippi. Even under French occupation there had been more Americans in St. Louis than French. At New Orleans docks bale after bale of goods from New York or from Charleston, from Massachusetts or from New Jersey, was shifted to the new keeled boats of the river. Up the Mississippi to St. Louis and beyond they went, branching off upon the Arkansas to push into the west. And down the river, borne with the incredible speed of that mighty current, came the flat-bottomed bateaux, laden with pack after pack of lustrous furs. “Where are they going?” Steven always asked the river captains as he watched the new boats, that went by steam, loading for the upstream voyage. “To the Oklahoma fur-traders at Fort Gibson, to Leavenworth for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company,” or, “For the Indians, for New Spain.” Fascinated by the broad bosom of the river as he was, Steven was a dozen times on the verge of running away up the Mississippi to see for himself the tribes of Indians living a wild free life on the plains. Something always happened to prevent. His mother had had a _fête champêtre_ at their country place at Pas Christian the last time he was so tempted. That was when he was thirteen; and the country beyond still remained a mystery. Persons of interest and importance came sometimes to the offices of Hamilton Mercer as well as to the _soirées_ of Madame Mercer. And on the day that Steven arrived at seventeen, and at a restlessness that could no longer be endured, two such were destined to present themselves at the merchant’s establishment. Hamilton Mercer had gone up the river to Pas Christian to oversee his plantations, and Steven was attending to some minor matters of business.