The afternoon was pretty well advanced when Sandy gave a whoop that was characteristic of the lad. No need to ask what made him leap about so boisterously, waving his coonskin cap around his head. Every eye turned in the direction of the expected vision; and, when they saw the great sweep of water that lay ahead, with its further shore but dimly marked against the western horizon, a silence fell upon them. It was indeed the Mississippi that spread before the eyes of that brave little company, up to then almost a sealed book to English colonists, though well known to the French trappers and traders, whose cordon of posts from north to south united Canada with the warm regions of the gulf. They had finally come to the region where their new home was to be built--on the bank of the Mississippi. CHAPTER XXIII WHAT THE DEAD ASHES OF A FIRE TOLD "PULL hard, Sandy; father wants to land at that spot where the big crooked tree hangs over the water. Pat has told him that it was there he spent the night a year ago, when he was here spying out the land and learning what the Frenchmen were doing in the trapping line. And he also says it is the finest place for our new home he knows about." While saying all this Bob was himself throwing his strength upon the sweep he and his younger brother were managing, while some of the men rested, or frolicked with their children inside the cabin of the flatboat. They were afloat on the Mississippi, and had been descending the mighty stream most of the day. To cross it with only a clumsy flatboat was next to impossible. It would have been exceedingly dangerous to have risked the diverse currents that lay in wait for the incautious voyager, far out from shore. Some of the men had even proposed that they try to make one of the islands that they had passed, and where it would seem they might be free from an attack on the part of the Indians; but to this Mr. Armstrong would not agree. "Look back, friends," he had said when this bold scheme was proposed, "and try to imagine what would have become of us and our families, had we been on such an island when the flood came. It was bad enough on the main land, watching our cabins being undermined, and carried off; but how much worse had we been watching the waters slowly but surely covering the very land on which all we loved stood, with the raging torrent on every side, and no means of reaching the shore? For my part, after what I have passed through, nothing can tempt me to leave this firm foundation. True, the Indians and French trappers may get at us the easier; but we know where we are, and in the other case we would not." And his words were of such a nature that even those who had been loudest in exploiting the benefits to be obtained by resorting to an island, changed their minds, and would have none of it.