that meal he rose an Indian-hater. He rose; got his arms,
prevailed upon some comrades to join him, and without delay started to
discover who were the actual transgressors. They proved to belong to a
band of twenty renegades from various tribes, outlaws even among
Indians, and who had formed themselves into a maurauding crew. No
opportunity for action being at the time presented, he dismissed his
friends; told them to go on, thanking them, and saying he would ask
their aid at some future day. For upwards of a year, alone in the wilds,
he watched the crew. Once, what he thought a favorable chance having
occurred--it being midwinter, and the savages encamped, apparently to
remain so--he anew mustered his friends, and marched against them; but,
getting wind of his coming, the enemy fled, and in such panic that
everything was left behind but their weapons. During the winter, much
the same thing happened upon two subsequent occasions. The next year he
sought them at the head of a party pledged to serve him for forty days.
At last the hour came. It was on the shore of the Mississippi. From
their covert, Moredock and his men dimly descried the gang of Cains in
the red dusk of evening, paddling over to a jungled island in
mid-stream, there the more securely to lodge; for Moredock's retributive
spirit in the wilderness spoke ever to their trepidations now, like the
voice calling through the garden. Waiting until dead of night, the
whites swam the river, towing after them a raft laden with their arms.
On landing, Moredock cut the fastenings of the enemy's canoes, and
turned them, with his own raft, adrift; resolved that there should be
neither escape for the Indians, nor safety, except in victory, for the
whites. Victorious the whites were; but three of the Indians saved
themselves by taking to the stream. Moredock's band lost not a man.

"'Three of the murderers survived. He knew their names and persons. In
the course of three years each successively fell by his own hand. All
were now dead. But this did not suffice. He made no avowal, but to kill
Indians had become his passion. As an athlete, he had few equals; as a
shot, none; in single combat, not to be beaten. Master of that
woodland-cunning enabling the adept to subsist where the tyro would
perish, and expert in all those arts by which an enemy is pursued for
weeks, perhaps months, without once suspecting it, he kept to the
forest. The solitary Indian that met him, died. Whe