Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III SAM STOPS TO VINDICATE THE MISSOURI; BUT GETS STARTED AGAIN i.ALDES sat and listened to me with his feet up on the guard-rail; and he showed he was interested all the way through. I liked him first-rate. So now he had told me why he was in a hurry to get up the river; and I had told him why I was in a hurry to get up the river. That kind of evened We did n't find no more to talk about right away; so we just sat and looked at things. Then I went up into the pilot-house; and I did n't get a chance to talk to him till next morning. We was getting clean up into the bluffs now. If there is anything I like it is a nice day coming through the Gasconades; you can look away up at the rocks and think most anything—steeples and pieces of churches and castles and shapes of things. things up. Sometimes it is just a wall all along—two hundred feet high maybe, and as flat and straight-up as you could make it. And there are more shapes than one man could ever think up. I bet if anybody was a bank robber and had maybe two thousand dollars it would be a good thing for him to go up into the bluffs. He could let himself down from the top of a place and get into a bore-hole; and I would like to see anybody catch him then. It took an awful time to make that scenery; it is different from the other kind. I have seen the kind that just looks as if the boilers inside the earth blew up and the busted pieces come down any way it happened. But you can see this scenery did n't happen all of a sudden; it was all made by water— and it is the best kind. That other kind of scenery just makes you think what a big explosion it was, and right away you can see how it happened. But this water scenery is all work; and nobody can ever think of so much work. That is the thing about it. Whe... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.