"Give your bed rolls to Billy," said he, at length, to his young friends. "He will take care of those buffalo robes forever. We may need them again, some time, all together. I will telegraph to have the outboard motors sent down to be fitted on our boat, the _Adventurer_, at Mandan. Of course, we could run down the Missouri a hundred or maybe one hundred and fifty miles a day; but as I said to you, that country is getting old now and the edge of our trip is wearing off. We have been dodging towns and farms long enough. Let's get on the train and go straight home!" And so now, after most reluctant farewells to Billy Williams and Con O'Brien, the young explorers, light of luggage, and, indeed, not heavy of heart, after all, changed their transportation that very day to the "medicine wagons," as the Indians formerly called railway trains, and soon were speeding eastward out of the Rocky Mountains and across the great Plains and Prairies. At St. Paul they changed for the train to St. Louis. En route they made no further reference to their own journals, and even John had ceased his interminable work on his handmade maps. The _Journal_, however--that great record of the Lewis and Clark expedition up the Missouri--remained always easily accessible; and just before the termination of their journey Uncle Dick picked it up once more and called his young friends around him. "We will soon be in St. Louis now," said he. "Here is where our explorers started out, and here is where they returned. Here is where William Clark did his great work as the first Indian Commissioner. Here is where poor Meriwether Lewis started east, three years after he had finished his great journey, and met his tragic death in the forests of Tennessee. No one will know what that man thought. Perhaps even then he was pondering on the ingratitude of republics. "But here is one thing which I wish every admirer of Lewis and Clark would read and remember--you can remember it, young friends, if you please. It is what Meriwether Lewis wrote, out there in the mountains near the Continental Divide, when he made up his _Journal_ on the evening of his birthday. Write it down, boys, just as he wrote it, ill spelling and all, so that you may see what he was doing and what he was thinking part of the time at least: "'To-day I had the raw-hides put in the water in order to cut them in throngs proper for lashing the packages and forming the necessary geer for pack horses, a business which I fortunately had not to learn on this occasion. Drewyer Killed one deer this evening. a beaver was also caught on by one of the party. I had the net arranged and set this evening to catch some trout which we could see in great abundance at the bottom of the river.