heading eastward and followed by a large company, poorly provisioned.  A number of the ships’ boats which had been lowered—­and moved, before the destruction began, were carried on the advice of Solomon.  Fortunately this party was not pursued.  Nearly every man in it had his gun and ammunition.  The scout had picked up a goodly outfit of axes and shovels and put them in the boats.  He organized his retreat with sentries, rear guard, signals and a plan of defense.  The carriers were shifted every hour.  After two days of hard travel through the deep woods they came to a lake more than two miles long and about half as wide.  Their provisions were gone save a few biscuit and a sack of salt.  There were sixty-four men in the party.

Solomon organized a drive.  A great loop of weary men was flung around the end of the lake more than a mile from its shore.  Then they began approaching the camp, barking like dogs as they advanced.  In this manner three deer and a moose were driven to the water and slain.  These relieved the pangs of hunger and insured the party, for some little time, against starvation.  They were, however, a long way from help in an unknown wilderness with a prospect of deadly hardships.  Solomon knew that the streams in this territory ran toward the sea and for that reason he had burdened the party with boats and tools.

The able scout explored a long stretch of the lake’s outlet which flowed toward the south.  It had a considerable channel but not enough water for boats or canoes even.  That night he began cutting timber for a dam at the end of the lake above its outlet.  Near sundown, next day, the dam was finished and the water began rising.  A rain hurried the process.  Two days later the big water plane had begun to spill into its outlet and flood the near meadow flats.  The party got the boats in place some twenty rods below and ready to be launched.  Solomon drove the plug out of his dam and the pent-up water began to pour through.  The stream was soon flooded and the boats floating.  Thus with a spirited water horse to carry them they began their journey to the sea.  Men stood in the bow and stern of each boat with poles to push it along and keep it off the banks.  Some ten miles below they swung into a large river and went on, more swiftly, with the aid of oars and paddles.

Thus Solomon became the hero of this ill-fated expedition.  After that he was often referred to in the army as the River Maker, although the ingenious man was better known as the Lightning Hurler, that phrase having been coined in Jack’s account of his adventures with Solomon in the great north bush.  In the ranks he had been regarded with a kind of awe as a most redoubtable man of mysterious and uncanny gifts since he and Jack had arrived in the Highlands fresh from their adventure of “shifting the skeer”—­as Solomon was wont to put it—­whereupon, with no great delay, the rash Colonel Burley had his Binkussing.  The scout was often urged to make a display of his terrible weapon but he held his tongue about it, nor would he play with the lightning or be induced to hurl it upon white men.