To begin with the Healds, who, as we have seen, were brought again together on the morning of August 16th, by the half-breed, Chandonnais. Darius Heald continues his report of his mother's narrative, as follows:
It is thought that the Indians went off down the lake to have "a general frolic;" in other words, to torture to death the wounded prisoners. On the night of the sixteenth, Captain and Mrs. Heald, accompanied by an Indian named Robinson [probably Chief Robinson, well known in Chicago for many years], embarked in a canoe and, unmolested, commenced their journey to Mackinaw. Chandonnais' friendship was no half-way matter. They traveled all that night and all next day, until late in the evening, when they saw a young deer coming down to the water in a little clump of bushes to get a drink. They drew as near the shore as possible, and the Indian lad stepped out and waded to the shore, skipped down the bank behind the deer and shot it. Then they pitched camp, dressed the deer, using the hide as a kneading-board, whereon Mrs. Heald stirred up some flour (they having brought a little in a leather bag from the fort) into a stiff paste, which she wound around sticks and toasted over the fire; and this Captain Heald afterward declared to be the finest bread he ever ate.
Here should come in, (according to Mrs. Helm's account in Wau-Bun) mention of a halt of some days at the mouth of the St. Joseph's river. It seems to me quite probable that the lapse of time had obliterated from Darius Heald's memory that part of his mother's narrative; or that he passed over, in talking to the stenographer, a matter which a timely question would have brought out. (See the Wau-Bun story, further on.)
They pushed on to Mackinaw, as Captain Heald said he had no chance of getting clear except by going to a British officer, and it was here that his parole was taken. It happened that Captain Heald and the officer in command at Mackinaw were both Free Masons, and Mrs. Heald says that they went off into a room by themselves, and that Captain Heald told his story and asked for help. He said that the Indians would pursue them, would not be more than twenty-four hours behind, and that a body would overtake them, and asked the British officer if he could protect them. The British officer said it would be a very hard matter in the fix they were in. If the Indians came down they might be overpowered; but that he would do this: He had a little "sailer" However, Captain Heald did not take the money of the noble and generous enemy, for he had at that moment some two hundred dollars, probably in gold, which his provident wife had sewn in the cuffs of his undershirt, a circumstance which would indicate that she, at least, foresaw possible tribulation before they left the fort. The Indians came in sight looking one hundred strong, and the British officer gave the sign for the little boat to move on. They went down to Detroit, and thence to Buffalo, whence they crossed to Pittsburg and went down the Ohio River, having procured, through an officer, some conveyance by which to go down the river, and they then drifted down, part of the way by boat and part of the way by raft, and in this way reached Kentucky soil. They reached Mrs. Heald's old home by night, past midnight, and rapped for admittance. Colonel Samuel Wells asked, "Who's there?" "A friend," said Captain Heald. "Well, who are you?" "Well, I am a friend." Mrs. Heald then spoke up and said, "Yes, two friends." Colonel Wells thought he recognized a woman's voice, and came to the door and opened it, and found himself face to face with his daughter, whom he had not seen for nearly two years, whom he had supposed to be dead, who left him as a bride and returned home as a wounded prisoner. They had been two months on the way from Fort Dearborn to Kentucky. Before her death, in 1856, Mrs. Heald had dictated to Mrs. Kerr, her niece, a large number of facts connected with her life. The manuscript was foolscap, and contained, Mr. Heald thinks, some hundreds of pages. It was in existence up to the time of the Union War, and he remembers seeing it wrapped up in a newspaper and tied with twine, at the Heald residence, in St. Charles County, Missouri, near the town of O'Fallon. During one of the incursions of Union soldiers the house was ransacked from top to bottom. Captain Heald's sword was taken away, and, greatest loss of all, that manuscript then disappeared, Mr. Heald thinks probably destroyed—burned among other papers supposed to be of no value. A negro boy, who had been raised by Mr. Heald, received word that that sword had been left somewhere not far from home, and was then being used as a corn-knife, and he obtained it and brought it back to Mr. Heald, who recognized it as what was left of his father's old sword; but alas! the manuscript has never been heard of—probably never will be. This is the nearest approach now possible to a reproduction of the facts it contained. The Wau-Bun narrative is more circumstantial, if not more trustworthy, and tends naturally in a different direction. It goes on: Along with Mr. Kinzie's party was a non-commissioned officer who had made his escape in a singular manner. As the troops were about leaving the fort it was found that the baggage horses of the surgeon had strayed off. The quartermaster-sergeant, Griffith, was sent to collect them and bring them on, it being absolutely necessary to recover them, since their packs contained part of the surgeon's apparatus and the medicines for the march.