Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters

by Edwin L. Sabin

In the morning he yelled and waved from the bank. A man, opposite, saw him, and ventured part way over in a canoe. The man was afraid.

"Who are you? Who do you aim to be?"

"I am John Slover. Take me to Fort Henry."

"You're an Injun. You're no John Slover. He's dead. I've a notion to shoot you, myself."

"I'm Slover. I am Slover. I've escaped from the Shawnees. I'll name you some of the officers who were with Crawford."

So he did. The man took him into the canoe. He was saved. In five days he had eaten only a handful of raspberries and two raw crawfish; in five nights he had not slept a wink; in four days and nights he had traveled across country, by horse and foot, naked except for the piece of blanketing, for a distance of about two hundred miles. He was the true never-say-die kind, and lived for many a year yet, to tell of his adventures and to put them upon paper.

James Paull had reached home before him, and before Doctor Knight also. James was only twenty-two, but he was an old hand at Indian fighting and at scouting. And he was a lad of great spirit, as will now be shown.

When the Indians had fired into the party and then had called upon them to surrender, he had been the one to dodge and run. His foot was very lame from a burn. During the battle his mess had baked bread by spreading the dough upon the back of a spade, scout fashion. Somebody had tossed the hot spade aside, and he had stepped upon it with his bare foot. The burn was a bad one; during the retreat his foot got worse and he could scarcely walk on it.

But now with two Indians chasing him, he paid no attention to his foot. He out-ran them, leaped down the steep bank of a creek, and in landing tore all the skin from his blistered sole. He paid attention to it then. Had to! A man with a flayed foot cannot do much, in the brush.

Luckily for him, the two Indians gave him up. He halted long enough to bind his raw foot with a piece of his trousers. He could not travel fast, but he used his wits. He knew all the tricks of the trail. He hobbled along fallen logs, so as to leave no marks. He back-tracked, in a circle, to cross his own trail and see if he was being followed. He painfully shinned up trees, wormed out to the end of a branch, and dropped as far beyond his trail as he might, so as to break it. This would throw off the dogs, if dogs were used; yes, and it would fool the Indians, too.