His dreaming ears must be stunned by the thunder of commerce, his nostrils shocked by the smell of the vast food-factories, his skin smutched with the smoke of the burning fuel all about him, to keep these wheels in motion. Bewildered and dumbfounded, even more wearied than he had been by his waking view, he would fain turn his eyes to the east and rest them on the shining calm of the great lake, the dancing blue water and the sky that covers it.
And so we bid him good-bye. Whatever dream visited his tired soul that Friday night was his last. The next day was the one whereon his heroic death was to crown his brave, loving, faithful, fruitless effort to shield the innocent and helpless from a relentless doom.
As the fatal Saturday has been fully treated in Part First of this book, I now pass on to the dark days which followed it, and gather up the details, meager and scanty, of the later life of the survivors, and their death, so far known to the living world.
[CHAPTER V.]
FATE OF THE FUGITIVES.
EVERY word bearing upon the adventures of the handful of Chicagoans left alive on Sunday, August 16th, 1812, has been carefully looked up and faithfully transcribed. Those words are few enough; the silence and darkness that enshroud their fate are more pathetically eloquent than speech could well be.