"You didn't get here any too soon," said he. "We shall be off in an hour. When we get to Fort La Framboise I have no doubt the captain of the _Belle_ will stop long enough for you to find out if your brother is there, Al, and if he is, we can all go on together to St. Louis." The _Belle Peoria_ was under way at the expected time. Though the water was quite low, her pilots were skilful and knew the river so thoroughly that for some time she met with no unusual delays. After their months of strenuous campaigning it was pleasant for the boys to lounge about on the steamer's decks with nothing to do except watch the interweaving ripples of the river's surface, the occasional bitterns and cranes which flopped up from the lonely sandbars and sailed slowly away as the boat approached, and the rise and fall of the endless succession of bluffs along the shores. In a few weeks the Northwestern Indian Expedition would be following the crests of the northward bluffs on its way to Fort Rice, where it would break up; the Second Brigade, with the exceptions of garrisons left at Fort Rice and Fort Berthold, returning to Minnesota; while the First Brigade would go on down to Fort Sully, Fort Randall, and Sioux City. After the crushing defeats which had been administered to the Indians at Tahkahokuty and the Little Missouri, it did not seem that steamboats on the Missouri ought to be in much danger from them; but the people on the _Belle Peoria_--both the members of her own crew and those of the _Island City_--knew that undoubtedly many hostiles had scattered from the broken Sioux camps who might be encountered anywhere along the river, eager for a chance to waylay a steamboat and slaughter a few of her crew in revenge for their own recent losses in battle. So, in laying the steamer up for the night, the men always "sparred her off" from the bank by setting long poles between the gunwale and the shore, so that she could not be boarded; or, if a mid-channel sandbar was convenient, with water on both sides of it, she would be moored there. Such precautions served well enough for night, but in the daytime the boat had to take her chances in following the channel close in against one shore or the other.