then that he got his wound.  He dove and reached the swift current which greatly aided his efforts.  Some white men in a boat about three hundred yards away witnessed his escape and said that the bullets “tore the river surface into rags” around him as he came up.  Courage and his skill as a diver and swimmer saved his life.  Far below, the boat, in which were a number of his fellow Scouts overtook him and helped him back to camp.  So it happened that a boy won a reputation in the “Black Hawk War” which was not lavish in its bestowal of honors.

When the dissatisfied volunteers were mustered out late in May, Kelso and McNeil, being sick with a stubborn fever, were declared unfit for service and sent back to New Salem as soon as they were able to ride.  Abe and Harry joined Captain Iles’ Company of Independent Rangers and a month or so later Abe re-enlisted to serve with Captain Early, Harry being under a surgeon’s care.  The latter’s wound was not serious and on July third he too joined Early’s command.

This company was chiefly occupied in the moving of supplies and the burying of a few men who had been killed in small engagements with the enemy.  It was a band of rough-looking fellows in the costume of the frontier farm and workshop—­ragged, dirty and unshorn.  The company was disbanded July tenth at Whitewater, Wisconsin, where, that night, the horses of Harry and Abe were stolen.  From that point they started on their long homeward tramp with a wounded sense of decency and justice.  They felt that the Indians had been wronged:  that the greed of land grabbers had brutally violated their rights.  This feeling had been deepened by the massacre of the red women and children at Bad Ax.

A number of mounted men went with them and gave them a ride now and then.  Some of the travelers had little to eat on the journey.  Both Abe and Harry suffered from hunger and sore feet before they reached Peoria where they bought a canoe and in the morning of a bright day started down the Illinois River.

They had a long day of comfort in its current with a good store of bread and butter and cold meat and pie.  The prospect of being fifty miles nearer home before nightfall lightened their hearts and they laughed freely while Abe told of his adventures in the campaign.  To him it was all a wild comedy with tragic scenes dragged into it and woefully out of place.  Indeed he thought it no more like war than a pig sticking and that was the kind of thing he hated.  At noon they put ashore and sat on a grassy bank in the shade of a great oak, to escape the withering sunlight of that day late in July, while they ate their luncheon.