The Keepers of the Trail: A Story of the Great Woods

by Joseph A. Altsheler

"The head chief of the Miamis wishes to speak, sir, and if you will pardon me for saying so, it will be wise for us to listen."

"Very well," said Alloway. "Tell us what he says."

Thus spoke Yellow Panther, head chief of the Miamis, veteran of many wars, through the medium of Braxton Wyatt:

"We and our brethren, the Shawnees, have come with many warriors upon a long war path. Our friends, the white men whom the mighty King George has sent across the seas to help us, have brought with them the great cannon which will batter down the forts of the Long Knives in Kaintuckee. But the signs are bad. The boats which were to carry the cannon on the river have been blown up. An enemy stands across our path and before we go farther we must hunt him down. If we cannot do it then Manitou has turned his face away from us."

Wyatt translated and Alloway sourly gave adhesion. It was hard for him to think that a single little group of borderers could hold up a great force like theirs, armed with cannon too. But he was acute enough to see that the menace of a rupture would become a reality if he insisted upon having his own way.

Henry had watched them while they talked, and then he turned aside to a point nearer the river's brink, from which he could see two pairs of their strongest canoes lashed together in the stream, ready for the reception of the cannon when they should come. How was he to get at them? He knew that he could not use a fire boat again, but these rafts, for such they were, must be destroyed in some manner.

Lying deep in the thickets he considered his problem. One of the reasons why he excelled nearly all the scouts of the border was because he thought so much harder and longer, and now he concentrated all his faculties for success.

It did not take him long to mature his plan, and when he had done so he moved down the stream, where the chance of an Indian sentinel discovering him was much smaller. There he waited a space, while the night darkened still more, the moon and stars being shut out entirely. A wind arose and little crumbling waves pursued one another on the surface of the river, which was flooded and yellow from spring rains.

He saw only one or two sentinels and they showed but dimly. Farther down the Englishmen, the chiefs and the renegades were sitting about the low fire, and he felt sure that the white men, at least, would sleep there by the coals. From his covert in the bushes he saw them presently spreading their blankets, and then they lay down with their feet to the smoldering fire. The chiefs soon followed them and elsewhere the warriors also rolled themselves in their blankets. They seemed to think that he would not come back, reasoning like the white men that the lightning would not strike in the same place twice.

So he waited long and patiently. This quality of patience was one in which the Caucasian was usually inferior to the Indian, but in the incessant struggle on the border it was always needed. Henry, through the power of his will and his original training among the Northwestern Indians, had acquired it in the highest degree. He could sit or lie an almost incredible length of time, so still that he would seem to blend into the foliage, and now as he lay in the bushes some of the little animals crept near and watched him. A squirrel, not afraid of the fire in the distance, came down the trunk of a tree, and hanging to the bark not five feet away regarded him with small red eyes.