in charge of military stores must have been received with somewhat mixed feelings.  On the one hand, his boyish love of adventure would be amply satisfied, while, on the other, there were risks to be faced which might well have caused more than uneasiness to many an older man—­risks which the boy’s acquaintances possibly were at no pains to conceal, which, indeed, a few of them would probably take pleasure in painting in the gloomiest of colours.  But duty was duty, and the lad had too great a share of Border stubbornness and grit to let himself be badly scared by such tales as were told to him.

The destination of the convoy was Fort Detroit.  In those far-off days New York was but a little city of some twenty thousand inhabitants, and the western part of New York State was quite outside the bounds of civilisation.  To reach the Canadian frontier there were then two great routes of military communication—­one, up the Hudson River, and so by way of Lakes George and Champlain and down the Richelieu to the St. Lawrence; the other, by the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, then by way of Lake Oneida and the Oswego River to the first of the great lakes, Lake Ontario; thence the journey to Fort Detroit would be chiefly by canoe, up Lakes Ontario and Erie.  Between the last military post at the head of the Mohawk, however, and the mouth of the Oswego River, there was a great gap in which no military post had been established.  Thus the route of the convoy to which Kerr was attached necessarily took them through country overrun by hostile Indian tribes.

No mishap, however, befell the party; probably they were too strong, too wary and well skilled in Indian warfare, to give the enemy a chance of ambushing or taking them by surprise on their march through the woods.

At Fort Detroit, it was found that a small exploring party, under a Captain Robson, was about to set out with the object of determining whether or not certain rivers and lakes were navigable, and young Kerr, boylike, eagerly volunteered to join the expedition.

Here began his strange adventures.  The party, all told, consisted but of eleven persons—­Captain Robson, Sir Robert Davers, six soldiers, two sailors, and young Kerr.  Apparently they did not think it necessary to take with them any colonists, or Indian scouts.  It is a curious characteristic of the average Britisher who finds himself in a new land, that he appears to regard it as an axiom that he must necessarily know much more than the average colonist; can, in fact, teach that person “how to suck eggs.”  The colonist, of course, on his part—­and in the majority of cases with justice—­regards the “new chum,” or “tender foot,” as a somewhat helpless creature.  But the Britisher despises, or at least he used to despise, the mere colonist.  Hence have arisen not a few disasters.  The little—­travelled Britisher does not readily learn that local conditions in all countries are not the same, that dispositions and customs which