"My craft in tripping the squaw and avoiding the greater number of my tormentors won me the protection of the chiefs, and while they waved off the boys and squaws, the young warrior Tecumseh, one of the brothers of the chief I had killed, claimed me for adoption in place of his kinsman. The other brother, Elskwatawa, promptly seconded Tecumseh. After much dispute, their claim was allowed, and for three years I lived as a member of the tribe, always watched against escape, yet treated with utmost kindness.
"That Fall the leading members of my tribe were present with the braves of the Miamis, Delawares, Wyandots, Iroquois, and other tribes, who made a second Braddock's Defeat of their battle with General St. Clair. They brought back no captives, but such quantities of plunder and such tales of slaughter that I could hardly credit either my eyes or my ears.
"After this I was taken to the neighborhood of the British fort near the Maumee Rapids, where the notorious renegade McKee proved that even the worst of men have their better nature. He sought to ransom me from my adopted brothers. This was refused, but I was permitted to come and go freely to the fort. One day, chancing upon a book of physic in the scant library of the post surgeon, I showed such interest that the portly old doctor seized upon me as a protégé.
"Within a year I was forced to return to the Shawnee towns, but with me I took a Latin grammar and my precious treatise on physic. Again I was brought to the Maumee, and there placed for safekeeping in the fort during General Wayne's cautious but steady advance north from Fort Washington. This meant months more of study under the tuition of my kindly surgeon; so that upon the day of Wayne's glorious victory at Fallen Timbers, when he drove the routed warriors of the allied tribes past the very walls of the fort, I was further advanced in my studies than many an English schoolboy of seventeen or eighteen, and, I must confess, fast acquiring British sympathies.
"But the sight of Wayne's victorious cavalry, who rode up defiantly within pistol-shot of the palisades, roused in me such a feverish desire to escape that I should have flung myself upon the bayonets of the sentinels rather than have remained. Fortunately the garrison was so intent upon the burning of the dwellings and trading establishments without the fort by our army, that I was able to slip over the stockade with the aid of a rope, and make off safely in the darkness."
Alisanda sighed her relief of the suspense that had held her tense. "So you escaped!" she exclaimed.
"To the American camp where I found both my father and my mother's cousin, Captain Van Rensselaer. The captain had been shot from his saddle during the battle, but was able to return with us to Cincinnati when my father's term of service as a mounted volunteer expired. It was Captain Rensselaer who, upon his return to New York, sent for me to complete my medical and other studies in Columbia College."
"Por Dios! What a life!" cried Don Pedro. "We also have our Indian battles. But to live among the ferocious savages—Santa Maria! Small wonder you men of the forest wilderness are men of iron!"
"Many settlers of soft fibre have come over the mountains since the days of peace. But the men who first hewed their homes in the wilderness had to be of iron. Such are those who now press on to the new frontiers of the South, the Lakes, and the Mississippi."
"Among whom is our friend Don Juan," replied Alisanda.