Jack turned to Williams. “Go ahead,” he ordered.
Alagwa started. Absorbed in the conversation, she had forgotten her own situation and the pressing need that she should get word of her movements to Tecumseh. Now abruptly she remembered. She was leaving Girty’s Town without having been seen by any one. Clearly Jack had forgotten her. Not once in his talk with Blue Jacket had he mentioned her part in the tragedy of the morning. He had asked no one to identify her. In another moment she would be gone. Her trail would be broken and the runners from Tecumseh would be unable to pick it up. Anxiously, she rolled back from the peep hole and half raised herself, hesitating whether to call out. Then she stopped with a gasp.
At the rear of the wagon, looking in, stood an Indian. How long he had been there she did not know; but as her eyes met his he made a swift sign for silence.
“Tecumseh send. I follow,” he muttered, in the Shawnee tongue. “Call like a whip-poor-will when you want.” Another moment and he was gone.
Alagwa dropped back on her couch and closed her eyes and lay still. As the wagon rolled away her heart was beating high. The runners had found her. The broken trail was whole again.
CHAPTER VIII
THE sun was visibly declining toward the west when the wagon, driven by Williams and followed by Jack Telfair and Cato, rumbled out of Girty’s Town and took the road down the St. Marys river.
The road led through the Black Swamp, that great morass of water-soaked quagmire that covered all northwestern Ohio, stretching forty miles from north to south and one hundred and twenty miles from east to west, from Fort Wayne to the Cuyahoga and the Western Reserve. All over it giant trees soared heavenward, springing from sunlight-starved ground on which no undergrowth could root. Between lay fallen limbs and rotting tree trunks, thick water-soaked moss, and carpets of moldering leaves, layer upon layer. No one that once crossed it ever forgot the treacherous quicksands that hid beneath the blighted plants, the crumbling logs half sunk in shiny pools where copperheads lay in wait, the low-hung branches that dripped moisture to the stunted vegetation, the clouds of venomous mosquitoes, the brilliant flies that clustered upon the dead even before it was dead, the labyrinths of tortuous runways. Except at midday no ray of sunlight ever penetrated the canopy of interlaced branches that arched overhead and that, to a soaring bird, must have looked as solid and unbroken as a grassy field.
Underfoot the ground was spongy with standing water that moved sluggishly, if at all, through creeks and rivers almost level with the surface. Shallow pools, alive with water-snakes, were everywhere.
A few roads, so-called, ran through this swamp. Mad Anthony Wayne had chopped a way through it from Greenville to Fort Defiance, what time he crushed the Miamis’ pride and retrieved Harmer’s and St. Clair’s defeats. Hull and his army were even then carving another road through it from Urbana to Detroit and disgrace and defeat. A third road, little more than a trail, followed down the Auglaize. Across these north-south passways ran the east-west road that Jack was following down the St. Marys, from Girty’s Town to Fort Wayne.