"We must exterminate Hunt's party," said Manuel Lisa.
"No," said Pierre Chouteau. "Next year he will send again and again, and in time will exterminate us. Your duty will be to protect his men on the water, and may God Almighty have mercy on them in the mountains, for they will never reach their destination."
From his new home at Charette John Coalter saw Astor's people going by, bound for the Columbia. To his surprise they inquired for him.
"General Clark told us you were the best informed man in the country."
Coalter told them of the hostility of the Blackfeet and the story of his escape. He longed to return with them to the mountains, but he had just married a squaw and he decided to stay. Moreover, a twinge in his limbs warned him that that plunge in the Jefferson had given him rheumatism for life.
Daniel Boone, standing on the bank at Charette when Hunt went by, came down and examined their outfit. "Jist returned from my traps on the Creek," he said, pointing to sixty beaver skins.
Tame beavers and otters, caught on an island opposite Charette Creek, were playing around his cabin. And his neighbours had elk and deer and buffalo, broken to the yoke.
Several seasons had Boone with his old friend Calloway trapped on the Kansas; now he longed for the mountains.
"Another year and I, too, will go to the Yellowstone," said Daniel Boone.
"Andrew Henry must be rescued. His situation is desperate. He may be dead," said General Clark, President of the Missouri Fur Company at St. Louis.
Three weeks behind Hunt, Lisa set out in a swift barge propelled by twenty oars, with a swivel on the bow and two blunderbusses in the cabin. Lisa had been a sea-captain,—he rigged his boat with a good mast, mainsail and topsail, and led his men with a ringing boat-song.
Then followed a keelboat race of a thousa
