I feel
confident that there is such a letter and we must find it."
"It's a pretty problem," said Paul.
"I admit it," said Oliver Pollock, "but a new continent teaches one to
achieve the impossible. That is what are we to do; how, I do not yet know,
but we must do it."
"It's important," said Henry, "that it be done soon."
"It certainly is," said Mr. Pollock with great emphasis, "because I wish
to start North soon with a great fleet of canoes and other boats loaded
with rifles, powder, lead, blankets, medicines, and other absolutely
necessary things for our suffering brethren in the east. They are hard
pressed there, and it takes a long time to pull up the Mississippi and the
Ohio and then carry these things across four or five hundred miles of
country to our army."
"It's shorely a wonderful thing," said Shif'less Sol, "that you kin take
boats up a big river hundreds an' hundreds o' miles into the heart o' a
continent, then bend off into another river runnin' into it that takes
you nearly over to the Atlantic. An' mebbe ef you took one o' the rivers
that runs in it on the other side you might follow it up 'till you got
purty near to the western ocean. It says to me plain ez print that we must
hev this here Mississippi all the way to its mouth.
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