Boone had occasion to have all these rites most painfully impressed on his memory; for he was obliged to conform to them with the rest.  One single thought occupied his mind—­to seize the right occasion to escape.

It was sometime before it offered.  At length a deer came in sight.  He had a portion of his unfinished breakfast in his hand.  He expressed a desire to pursue the deer.  The party consented.  As soon as he was out of sight, he instantly turned his course towards Boonesborough.  Aware that he should be pursued by enemies as keen on the scent as bloodhounds, he put forth his whole amount of backwoods skill, in doubling in his track, walking in the water, and availing himself of every imaginable expedient to throw them off his trail.  His unfinished fragment of his breakfast was his only food, except roots and berries, during this escape for his life, through unknown forests and pathless swamps, and across numerous rivers, spreading in an extent of more than two hundred miles.  Every forest sound must have struck his ear, as a harbinger of the approaching Indians.

No spirit but such an one as his, could have sustained the apprehension and fatigue.  No mind but one guided by the intuition of instinctive sagacity, could have so enabled him to conceal his trail, and find his way.  But he evaded their pursuit.  He discovered his way.  He found in roots, in barks, and berries, together with what a single shot of his rifle afforded, wherewith to sustain the cravings of nature.  Travelling night and day, in an incredible short space of time he was in the arms of his friends at Boonesborough, experiencing a reception, after such a long and hopeless absence, as words would in vain attempt to portray.

CHAPTER X.

Six hundred Indians attack Boonesborough—­Boone and Captain Smith go out to treat with the enemy under a flag of truce, and are extricated from a treacherous attempt to detain them as prisoners—­Defence of the fort—­The Indians defeated—­Boone goes to North Carolina to bring bark his family.

It will naturally be supposed that foes less wary and intelligent, than those from whom Boone had escaped, after they had abandoned the hope of recapturing him, would calculate to find Boonesborough in readiness for their reception.

Boonesborough, though the most populous and important station in Kentucky, had been left by the abstraction of so many of the select inhabitants in the captivity of the Blue Licks, by the absence of Colonel Clarke in Illinois, and by the actual decay of the pickets, almost defenceless.  Not long before the return of Boone, this important post had been put under the care of Major Smith, an active and intelligent officer.  He repaired thither, and put the station, with great labor and fatigue, in a competent state of defence.  Learning from the return of some of the prisoners, captured at the Blue Licks, the great blow which the Shawnese meditated against this station, he deemed it advisable to anticipate their movements, and to fit out an expedition to meet them on their own ground.—­Leaving twenty young men to defend the place, he marched with thirty chosen men towards the Shawnese towns.