but he was too weak.  He smiled, pointed to the wound and said:  ‘Deathwind not heap times bad shot.’  Then he bowed his head and waited for the tomahawk.  Well, I picked him up and carried him ashore and made a shack by a spring.  I staid there with him.  When he got well enough to stand a few days’ travel I got him across the river and givin’ him a hunk of deer meat I told him to go, and if I ever saw him again I’d make a better shot.

“A year afterwards I trailed two Shawnees into Wingenund’s camp and got surrounded and captured.  The Delaware chief is my great enemy.  They beat me, shot salt into my legs, made me run the gauntlet, tied me on the back of a wild mustang.  Then they got ready to burn me at the stake.  That night they painted my face black and held the usual death dances.  Some of the braves got drunk and worked themselves into a frenzy.  I allowed I’d never see daylight.  I seen that one of the braves left to guard me was the young feller I had wounded the year before.  He never took no notice of me.  In the gray of the early mornin’ when all were asleep and the other watch dozin’ I felt cold steel between my wrists and my buckskin thongs dropped off.  Then my feet were cut loose.  I looked round and in the dim light I seen my young brave.  He handed me my own rifle, knife and tomahawk, put his finger on his lips and with a bright smile, as if to say he was square with me, he pointed to the east.  I was out of sight in a minute.”

“How noble of him!” exclaimed Betty, her eyes all aglow.  “He paid his debt to you, perhaps at the price of his life.”

“I have never known an Indian to forget a promise, or a kind action, or an injury,” observed Col.  Zane.

“Are the Indians half as bad as they are called?” asked Betty.  “I have heard as many stories of their nobility as of their cruelty.”

“The Indians consider that they have been robbed and driven from their homes.  What we think hideously inhuman is war to them,” answered Col.  Zane.

“When I came here from Fort Pitt I expected to see and fight Indians every day,” said Capt.  Boggs.  “I have been here at Wheeling for nearly two years and have never seen a hostile Indian.  There have been some Indians in the vicinity during that time but not one has shown himself to me.  I’m not up to Indian tricks, I know, but I think the last siege must have been enough for them.  I don’t believe we shall have any more trouble from them.”

“Captain,” called out Col.  Zane, banging his hand on the table.  “I’ll bet you my best horse to a keg of gunpowder that you see enough Indians before you are a year older to make you wish you had never seen or heard of the western border.”

“And I’ll go you the same bet,” said Major McColloch.

“You see, Captain, you must understand a little of the nature of the Indian,” continued Col.  Zane.  “We have had proof that the Delawares and the Shawnees have been preparing for an expedition for months.  We shall have another siege some day and to my thinking it will be a longer and harder one than the last.  What say you, Wetzel?”