Skinny's arrow had struck the girl and hurt her a little, but not much. She was scared half to death.
Mr. Norton had a fine supper ready when we reached the camp again, and we ate until we couldn't eat any longer.
"You boys ought to know what you are doing every minute you are in the woods," he told us, after he had heard about the scare. "Suppose that Gabriel had been carrying a gun, as he wanted to, instead of a bow and arrows. Just think what would have happened. Hundreds of people have been killed in exactly that way. Careless hunters have mistaken them for bear or deer or some other game. You ought to have known what you were shooting at. It was a foolish thing to do, anyway. I don't believe there can be any bears around where so many people are looking for ferns and berries. We'll see dozens of pickers on the other side of the mountain, probably. If there ever were any bears they have been frightened away long before this. But suppose that had been a bear. For a bunch of boys to attack a bear with bows and arrows isn't bravery. It is foolishness. I am ashamed of you."
We didn't feel quite so chesty when Mr. Norton had finished talking to us.
"Well, I am not going to spoil the day by scolding," he went on, after we'd had time to think it over a little. "You can see the folly of it as well as I. Let us sit here and watch the sun go down behind the west mountains. Did you ever see such glory? Then, when it grows dark, we'll build a campfire and I'll tell you about a great scout and a trip he once made through a wilderness."
It was fine sitting there, watching the sun sink into a golden sea behind the mountains, while the valley below was already in the shadow and the dark was creeping up the hillsides.
We sat there a long time without speaking, until finally the golden sea faded into a streak of gray, and up and down the valley we could see the twinkling lights of a half dozen towns and the farmhouses between.
Then Mr. Norton threw an armful of brush on the coals, and in the light of the blaze, which made the shadows dance like ghosts of Indian braves, he began his story.
"Some of you boys went out to Illinois, last summer," said he, "and I know from what you have told me that you learned much about the great French scout, LaSalle; how he explored the Ohio River and went up and down the Mississippi, taking possession of the country in the name of the king of France. We already have had one story which grew out of those early explorations. The Lewis and Clark Expedition through the Northwest, which I told you about, can be traced back to those scouting trips of LaSalle and the others, on account of which France claimed the country.
"This story is of another scouting trip, long after LaSalle's time and before Lewis and Clark were born, probably. It took place even before the United States was born, but, in a way, it grew out of those same trips of LaSalle and Tonty, Marquette and Joliet, the French explorers of the seventeenth century."