“What foolishness is this?” he said, eying the dripping drum.

“Sure, Colonel,” said McCann, swinging it on his back, “we’d have no heart in us at Kaskasky widout the rattle of it in our ears.  Bill Cowan and me will not be feeling the heft of it bechune us.”

“Get into ranks,” said the Colonel, amusement struggling with the anger in his face as he turned on his heel.  His wisdom well knew when to humor a man, and when to chastise.

“Arrah,” said Terence, as he took his place, “I’d as soon l’ave me gun behind as Davy and the dhrum.”

Methinks I can see now, as I write, the long file of woodsmen with their swinging stride, planting one foot before the other, even as the Indian himself threaded the wilderness.  Though my legs were short, I had both sinew and training, and now I was at one end of the line and now at the other.  And often with a laugh some giant would hand his gun to a neighbor, swing me to his shoulder, and so give me a lift for a weary mile or two; and perchance whisper to me to put down my hand into the wallet of his shirt, where I would find a choice morsel which he had saved for his supper.  Sometimes I trotted beside the Colonel himself, listening as he talked to this man or that, and thus I got the gravest notion of the daring of this undertaking, and of the dangers ahead of us.  This north country was infested with Indians, allies of the English and friends of the French their subjects; and the fact was never for an instant absent from our minds that our little band might at any moment run into a thousand warriors, be overpowered and massacred; or, worst of all, that our coming might have been heralded to Kaskaskia.

For three days we marched in the green shade of the primeval wood, nor saw the sky save in blue patches here and there.  Again we toiled for hours through the coffee-colored waters of the swamps.  But the third day brought us to the first of those strange clearings which the French call prairies, where the long grass ripples like a lake in the summer wind.  Here we first knew raging thirst, and longed for the loam-specked water we had scorned, as our tired feet tore through the grass.  For Saunders, our guide, took a line across the open in plain sight of any eye that might be watching from the forest cover.  But at length our column wavered and halted by reason of some disturbance at the head of it.  Conjectures in our company, the rear guard, became rife at once.

“Run, Davy darlin,’ an’ see what the throuble is,” said Terence.

Nothing loath, I made my way to the head of the column, where Bowman’s company had broken ranks and stood in a ring up to their thighs in the grass.  In the centre of the ring, standing on one foot before our angry Colonel, was Saunders.

“Now, what does this mean?” demanded Clark; “my eye is on you, and you’ve boxed the compass in this last hour.”

Saunders’ jaw dropped.

“I’m guiding you right,” he answered, with that sullenness which comes to his kind from fear, “but a man will slip his bearings sometimes in this country.”