“We’re piling up earthworks and barricades,” said the Captain, “for the fight to-morrow.  My God! if the Willing would only come, we could put our cannon into them.”

Clark laughed.

“Bowman,” said he, kindly, “has Davy fed you yet?”

“No,” says the Captain, surprised, “I’ve had no time to eat.”

“He seems to have fed the whole army,” said the Colonel.  He paused.  “Have they scented Lamothe or Maisonville?”

“Devil a scent!” cried the Captain, “and we’ve scoured wood and quagmire.  They tell me that Lamothe has a very pretty force of redskins at his heels.”

“Let McChesney go,” said Clark sharply, “McChesney and Ray.  I’ll warrant they can find ’em.”

Now I knew that Maisonville had gone out a-chasing Captain Willing’s brother,—­he who had run into our arms.  Lamothe was a noted Indian partisan and a dangerous man to be dogging our rear that night.  Suddenly there came a thought that took my breath and set my heart a-hammering.  When the Colonel’s back was turned I slipped away beyond the range of the firelight, and I was soon on the prairie, stumbling over hummocks and floundering into ponds, yet going as quietly as I could, turning now and again to look back at the distant glow or to listen to the rifles popping around the fort.  The night was cloudy and pitchy dark.  Twice the whirring of startled waterfowl frightened me out of my senses, but ambition pricked me on in spite of fear.  I may have gone a mile thus, perchance two or three, straining every sense, when a sound brought me to a stand.  At first I could not distinguish it because of my heavy breathing, but presently I made sure that it was the low drone of human voices.  Getting down on my hands and knees, I crept forward, and felt the ground rising.  The voices had ceased.  I gained the crest of a low ridge, and threw myself flat.  A rattle of musketry set me shivering, and in an agony of fright I looked behind me to discover that I could not be more than four hundred yards from the fort.  I had made a circle.  I lay very still, my eyes watered with staring, and then—­the droning began again.  I went forward an inch, then another and another down the slope, and at last I could have sworn that I saw dark blurs against the ground.  I put out my hand, my weight went after, and I had crashed through a coating of ice up to my elbow in a pool.  There came a second of sheer terror, a hoarse challenge in French, and then I took to my heels and flew towards the fort at the top of my speed.

I heard them coming after me, leap and bound, and crying out to one another.  Ahead of me there might have been a floor or a precipice, as the ground looks level at night.  I hurt my foot cruelly on a frozen clod of earth, slid down the washed bank of a run into the Wabash, picked myself up, scrambled to the top of the far side, and had gotten away again when my pursuer shattered the ice behind me.  A hundred yards more, two figures loomed up in front, and I was pulled up choking.