The third day after my escape, my companion Aleck found his way into camp. He entered the lodge with dejection on his features.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, “I thank God for my escape, but the Indians have killed poor Jim. I saw his bones a few miles back. I will give anything I have if a party will go with me and bury him. The wolves have almost picked his bones, but it must be he. Poor, poor Jim! gone at last!”
“Ha!” said some one present, “is Jim killed, then? Poor fellow! Well, Aleck, let us go back and give him a Christian burial.”
He had seen a body nearly devoured on the way, most likely that of the wounded Indian who had chased me in his retreat from our camp.
I came limping into the crowd at this moment, and addressed him before he had perceived me: “Halloo, Aleck, are you safe?”
He looked at me for a moment in astonishment, and then embraced me so tight that I thought he would suffocate me. He burst into a flood of tears, which for a time prevented his articulation. He looked at me again and again, as if in doubt of my identity.
At length he said, “Oh, Jim, you are safe! And how did you escape? I made sure that you were killed, and that the body I saw on the road was yours. Pshaw! I stopped and shed tears on a confounded dead Indian’s carcass!”
Aleck stated that the enemy had passed within ten feet without perceiving him; that his gun was cocked and well primed, so that if he had been discovered there would have been at least one red skin less to chase me. He had seen no Indians on his way to camp.
I was satisfied that some (if not all) of my pursuers knew me, for they were Black Feet, or they would not have taken such extraordinary pains to run me down. If they had succeeded in their endeavor, they would, in subsequent years, have saved their tribe many scalps.
From this encampment we moved on to Lewis’s Fork, on the Columbia River, where we made a final halt to prepare for the fall trapping season. Some small parties, getting tired of inaction, would occasionally sally out to the small mountain streams, all of which contained plenty of beaver, and would frequently come in with several skins.