It was a slow journey, but no one could have called it monotonous, for a score of times every day all hands were called out to hard work of one sort or another. Now it was to pole the barge off a shoal place on which she had drifted, or again, to row her down the length of some bend against a flat head wind which was beating her back up the river faster than the current bore her the other way. Occasionally the men had to land and, taking hold of a long "cordelle rope" attached to the barge's stern, walk up the bank in a long, straining line and pull her back into the channel from some "blind chute" into which she had blundered, dragging her along as in the early days of the fur trade the crews of the keel boats were obliged to drag their vessels clear from St. Louis to Fort Union, except when rare favoring winds allowed the use of a sail. More than once during the long days between Omaha and Kansas City, Al and his companions worked for hours up to their waists and shoulders in the water alongside the barge, freeing her from some obstruction or a lodgement against the bank. But all labors have an end, and at length the great bend at Kansas City came in sight, with the little town straggling along the river and the rugged, precipitous hills rising behind it, which in a few decades were destined to be covered with the crowded dwellings and the towering business structures of a great metropolis. The barge was moored for the night, and most of her crew, including Al and Wallace, seized the opportunity to get a glimpse of civilization once more and to hear the news of the day by strolling up-town in the evening. "I'll tell you what I want," said Wallace, as they walked along Broadway, looking into the brightly lighted shop windows and enjoying the novel sensation of being on a busy street with crowds of people about them. "I want a great, big, tall, fat glass of lemonade, with ice in it. I haven't had one since I was in St. Paul last." "Nor I since I left St. Louis," rejoined Al. "That for me, too." They soon came to an ice-cream and confectionery store where a number of people were sitting about at small tables, eating, drinking, and talking, quite after the manner of dwellers in a real city. The boys took their places in two vacant chairs at a table where two men were seated, one a soldier and the other a civilian. After giving their orders to the waiter, the boys sat silent for a moment, feeling an embarrassing consciousness of their decidedly soiled and unkempt appearance in the comparatively well dressed crowd, which included a number of ladies. Presently the soldier at their table said to his companion, after a silence induced by the intrusion of the boys upon their privacy, "Well, anyhow, I'll tell you if old Pap Price ever gets as far as the Kansas line with his ragamuffin army, we'll give him a reception that he won't forget soon." Al and Wallace began to listen, for this sounded interesting.