"Ready, brothers," he called, pushing the undamaged canoe afloat. "We must be beyond musket-shot when the Shawnees reach here. Ha, their hearts will be very sad. There will be sorrow in their lodges. But they have learned that a band of deer-hunters cannot overcome three warriors who are wily in the chase."
We bent to the paddles, and drove the clumsy craft—'twas much heavier than the one we had lost—out into the current, where we might have the benefit of the river's drift. And, fortunately, we were a long shot distant when the first Shawnees reached the bank. Several of their bullets splashed close to us, but they soon abandoned the waste of powder, and we could hear the ululating howls by which they sought to recall their absent warriors and announce our escape.
Nightfall found us many miles downstream, but Tawannears would not suffer us to halt. Wet to the bone with sweat and river-water, we paddled on with weary arms that ached, eyes straining into the darkness to ward against rock or floating tree-branch. Near midnight the moon rose, and we could see the channel distinctly; but this was another reason for haste, and we did not rest until the gray dawn light revealed a sandy, brush-covered islet in midstream. Here we beached the canoe, hauled it out of sight, and lay down beside it to sleep like dead men under the warmth of the sun.
CHAPTER IV
A MEETING IN THE WILDERNESS
Summer blew up from the South and wrapped the Wilderness Country in a misty languor. Our arms lagged at the paddling. We were prone to idling back against the thwarts and watching the vast flocks of birds that flew northward, and especially the incalculable myriads of the pigeons, flights of such monstrous proportions that they darkened the sky. Ay, they shut out the light of the sun, for an hour at a time, the whirring of their wings and their sharp cries like the faint echoes of fairy drums and fifes.
The forest trees hung heavy with foliage, vividly green, and the occasional meadows and savannahs were gemmed with wild-flowers, white and red and yellow and blue and pink and purple. The scent of the growing things was borne to us by the gusty breeze that puffed and died and puffed again, heavy as the humid air, uncertain, indeterminate. At intervals storm-clouds tore down upon us, black, towering galleons of wrath; there would be thunder in the heavens; lightning-bolts streaked earthward to devastate the forest monarchs; and the rain would spill upon us like the torrents of the Thunder Waters at Jagara.*
* Niagara.
For two weeks we traversed this paradise without evidence of other men. Alone we surveyed the area of a kingdom. All France, I say, might have been rooted up and transplanted to this neglected wonderland to which her King laid inconsequential claim. Here were timber, ready for the axe; splendid grazing grounds where only the deer wandered; endless fields of rich black loam, awaiting the husbandman. And the very savages seemed to have abandoned it. If any watched us pass, they contrived to remain unseen. From horizon to horizon there was not a curl of smoke to show a human habitation.
But there were others besides ourselves on the bosom of the Ohio, as we soon discovered. We had slipped by the mouth of the Ouabache in the night, thinking thus to elude the observation of a possible picket thrown out from the French post of Vincennes, although, to say truth, we saw no trace of such an outpost. After a few hours' sleep we were paddling on, encouraged by Tawannears' assertion that two or three days more should bring us to the Mississippi, which we regard as the barrier of that ulterior Wilderness where our real search began, when we rounded one of the river's frequent bends to face at short range a fleet of canoes that thronged the stream from shore to shore.