icines to their sick, allowed his men to go shooting
with them, and even nursed one ill chief inside the barracks; but he
was most careful not to allow women or more than a few warriors inside
the fort.

What was his horror, then, on February 18, when Atto, the Hawaiian boy,
came to him with news that the Indians, gathered to the number of two
thousand, and armed with at least two hundred muskets got in trade, had
planned the entire extermination of the whites. They had offered to
make the Hawaiian boy a great chief among them if he would steal more
ammunition for the Indians, wet all the priming of the white men's
arms, and join the conspiracy to let the savages get possession of fort
and ship. In the history of American pathfinding, no explorer was ever
in greater {234} danger. Less than a score of whites against two
thousand armed warriors! Scarcely any ammunition had been brought in
from the _Columbia_. All the swivels of the dismantled ship were lying
on the bank. Gray instantly took advantage of high tide to get the
ship on her sea legs, and out from the bank. Swivels were trundled
with all speed back to the decks. For that night a guard watched the
fort; but the next night, when the assault was expected, all hands were
on board, provisions had been stowed in the hold, and small arms were
loaded. The men were still to mid-waist in water, scraping barnacles
from the keel, when a whoop sounded from the shore; but the change in
the ship's position evidently upset the plans of the savages, for they
withdrew. On the morning of the 20th the woods were seen to be alive
with ambushed men; and Haswell had the cannon loaded with canister
fired into the woods. At eleven that very morning, the chief, at the
head of the plot, came to sell otter skins, and ask if some of the crew
would not visit the village. Gray jerked the skins from his arms, and
the rascal was over decks in terror of his life. That was the end of
the plot. On the 23d the _Adventure_ was launched, the second vessel
built on the Pacific, the first American vessel built there at all; and
by April 2 Haswell was ready to go north on her. Gray on the
_Columbia_ was going south to have another try at that great River of
the West, which Spanish charts represented.

{235} Without a doubt, if the river existed at all, it was down behind
that Cape Disappointment where Meares had failed to go in, and Heceta
been driven back. Just what Gray did between