of these Border clans. This
story of his adventures is literally true, as the family records prove,
but the descendants of the person to whom they happened prefer that he
should not figure in the tale under his own name. For convenience,
therefore, it must suffice here to call him Andrew Kerr.

The responsibilities of life began early in his day. A boy who would now
find himself in a very junior form at school, was then considered old
enough to serve his Majesty in a marching regiment, or left his home to
engage in business whilst yet his handwriting had scarcely emerged from
childhood's clumsy formation, and veritable infants served as
midshipmen in ships of war. Young Kerr was no exception to this general
rule. Long before the boy had reached the age of sixteen he was shipped
off to New York, there to join an uncle who, in order to engage in
commerce, had lately retired from the 60th "Royal American" Regiment,
then a famous colonial corps.

Those were stirring times, and for a passenger the voyage to America was
no hum-drum affair devoid of excitement or peril. We were at war with
France and Spain. Every white sail, therefore, that showed above the
horizon meant the coming of a possible enemy; no day passed, in some
part of which there might not chance to arise the necessity to employ
every device of seamanship if escape were to be effected should the
enemy prove too big to fight, or in which there was not at least the
possibility of smelling powder burned in earnest.

Nor were danger and excitement necessarily ended with the ship's arrival
in New York harbour. We were still fighting the French in Canada; men
yet told grim tales of Braddock's defeat and of the horrors of Indian
warfare. To him whom business or duty took far from the sea-board into
the country of the savage and treacherous Iroquois, there was the
ever-present probability that he would some day--perhaps many times--be
compelled to fight for his life, with the certainty that, if disabled by
wounds he fell into the enemy's hands, the scalp would be torn from his
skull ere death could put an end to his sufferings; whilst capture
meant, almost for a certainty, the being eventually put to death after
undergoing the most hideous tortures that the cruelty of the Redskins
could devise. To the colonists, "the only good Indian was a dead
Indian"; and doubtless, by the newly-landed Andrew Kerr, the order at
once to proceed up-country with a convoy in charge of