s out and darting away among the bushes.
Oddly enough he is unnoticed--a remnant of the soldiers are dying
hardly--and he escapes to where the bushes are more dense. About a
cottonwood tree in the distance appears greater covert. Around the tree
has been part of the struggle, but the ghastly tide has passed, and
there are only dead men there. The boy is in mortal terror, but his
instinct does not fail him. There is a heap of brush, the top of some
tree felled by a storm, and beneath the mass he writhes and wriggles and
is lost from view.

There is a rush of returning footsteps; there is a clamor of many Indian
voices about the brush-heap, but the boy is undiscovered. The savages
are not seeking him. They count all the whites as slain or captured, and
are now but intent on plunder. Night falls. The child slips from his
hiding place, and runs to the southward. Suddenly a dark figure rises in
his path, and the grasp of a strong hand is upon his shoulder. He
struggles frantically, but only for a moment. His own language is
spoken. It is in the voice of a friendly Miami fleeing, like the boy,
from the Pottowatomies. The Indian takes the boy by the hand, and
hurries him to the westward, to the Mississippi.

It is the year 1835. One of a band of trappers venturing up the Missouri
is a slender, quiet man, the deadliest shot in the party. Good trapper
he is, but the fame he has earned among adventurers of his class is not
from fur-getting. He is a lonely man, but a creature of action. He never
seeks to avoid the Indian trails. Cautious and crafty he is, certainly,
but he follows closely the westward drift of the red men, and when
opportunity comes he spares not at all. He is a hunter of Indians,
vengeance personified. He is the boy who hid beneath the brush-heap; the
memory of that awful day and night is ever with him, and he seeks
blindly to make the equation just. To his single arm have fallen more
savages than fell whites on the day of the massacre by the lake. Still
he moves westward.

It is the year 1893 now. An old man occupies a farm in the remote
Northwest. He has lost none of his faculties, nor nearly all his
strength, though he is eighty-nine years of age. The long battle with
the dangers of the wilds is done. The old man listens to the talk of
those about him, of how a great nation is inviting all the nations of
the world to take part in a monster jubilee, because of the
quadri-centennial of a continent's discovery