Trailing the guns, and stooping, using their best scout methods they scuttled through the by-ways. They safely won the open; then ransacked the hollow tree, and plunged on, to head south, through the forest, for distant Louisville at the Falls of the Ohio. Upon a great circuit, to throw off the pursuit, they traveled, traveled, traveled by a series of night marches, until after thirty days they arrived at the Colonel George Rogers Clark settlement, to-day the city of Louisville, Kentucky.
Simon had been absent from Kentucky nine months. In one space of four weeks he had been beaten eight times by the gauntlet or otherwise; had three times been condemned to burning at the stake, had been painted black and was being condemned a fourth time, to certain death, when rescued by the accident of meeting Chief Logan. But he lived to be over eighty and died peacefully in his bed at last—which proves that the most desperate peril is never hopeless. Dangers do not surely mean death.
He went right out upon another scout against the Indians. He continued to be a scout, and a soldier, and was with General "Mad Anthony" Wayne at the decisive battle of the Fallen Timbers, in 1794, when the backs of the Shawnees, Miamis, Wyandots, Delawares, Senecas, and all, joined together by Chief Little Turtle, Chief Blue-jacket and Simon Girty, were broken to fragments.
He fought the Shawnees again in the War of 1812. He had been living at Urbana, Illinois, and was appointed brigadier general of the Illinois militia; but he enlisted as a private.
When he died, in April, 1836, it was in his cabin on the site of that very Wakatomica, the Black Fish town where he had suffered tortures. Long before this he had become Simon Kenton; he had learned that he was no murderer, after all; he had met his one-time rival, Leitchman, and they had "made up."
[[1]] See "Boys' Book of Indian Warriors."