I pushed off into a quiet current that was in strange contrast to the wind-torn welter of white I had seen at that bend the evening before. The air on the river was fairly drenched with the heavy odour of crushed vegetation, which seemed to have drained there from higher levels. This was pronounced at all times, but where I skirted fields of sweet clover there was a palpability to the perfume which suggested that one might almost gather it in his hands and allow it to pour through his fingers. In the Marquesas there is a little yellow-blossomed bush called the _cassi_, the pollen from which blows far to leeward before the South-east Trade. At times I have thought that I could detect the delicate odour of blown-_cassi_ ten miles at sea, yet never even in kicking my way through a copse of the fragrant little bush have I been assailed with such a veritable flow of perfume as coiled and streamed about me as I drifted down toward the mouth of the Yellowstone that morning after the great hail-storm. Doubtless, indeed, the hail was responsible. Crushed and dying, the voiceless "Friend of Man" was chanting its "Swan Song" in the only medium at its command. A couple of miles below the bend where the storm had caught me I passed into North Dakota at a point called the State Line Ferry. An hour later I ran under the bridge of a branch of the Great Northern. It was a fine, bold piece of construction, and it was in my mind at the time that its builder must be an outstanding man in his line. This surmise was vindicated a month later when I found him putting in the first piers of a bridge to span the Missouri at Yankton. Incidentally, some of his false-work got in the way of my skiff and all but dumped me out into the "Big Muddy." Below Forsyth's Butte, last of the outstanding landmarks of the Yellowstone, the country on both sides began to smoothen and flatten out and offer less resistance to the spread of the river. The broad over-flow flats offered an ideal breeding ground for mosquitos, recalling to me that a very large portion of Clark's journey of early August was devoted to telling of the mental and physical suffering inflicted upon the members of his party by the swarms of stinging pests they had encountered just above and below the mouth of the Yellowstone. From Clark's time down to the present this particular region has always been regarded as "The Dark and Bloody Ground of the Mosquito Coast of Dakota." I was resolved to put bars between myself and the enemy that night--if not the mosquito bars of a hotel room, then the mid-stream sand-bars of the Missouri. [Illustration: THE BROAD STREAM OF THE YELLOWSTONE BELOW GLENDIVE] [Illustration: THE LAST BRIDGE ABOVE THE MISSOURI] [Illustration: WHERE THE YELLOWSTONE TAKES POSSESSION OF THE MISSOURI]