asured by change,
very long ago. Then, the country was little different from what it had
been for thousands of years. Now, it seems another world and the map
of it shows great cities where were forests and connecting these are
what at first resemble spiders' webs, but which are highways. Few
white men then came to that region, where now few red men are seen,
indeed none living the life they then lived. Such whites as came were
a few French voyageurs and Jesuit missionaries and hunters and traders
from the English colonies. The traders did not scruple to exchange,
for valuable furs, guns, tomahawks and ammunition, which they knew
would be turned against the whites of the frontier in time of war; and
many of them sold the savages liquor, knowing an Indian would sell his
soul for it and having drank it would become a fiend incarnate.

On the south flowed the Ohio River, along which white men were
pushing their way, and settling on land in what is now Kentucky and
Tennessee, and looking with covetous eyes on the land between that
river and the lakes, but which the Indians claimed had been reserved
to them by treaty. The shrewder among the Indian leaders foresaw the
time when they would have to fight and overwhelm the intruders or
submit to their hunting grounds being spoiled by the white man. This
feeling of uneasiness was spreading among the tribes, and the younger
warriors were eager to fight and not infrequently were guilty of
marauding expeditions.

One day a party of young braves had returned from a hunting expedition
down in what was called "the dark and bloody ground," Kentucky, which
the Indians of the North and the Cherokees and Chickasaws of the South
made common use of for a hunting place. Frequent were the bloody
skirmishes fought by these hostile tribes in this territory, though
none of the Indians made permanent homes there. This party had brought
back several scalps and among them Conrad noted two torn from the
heads of white men. Ahneota had looked grave and the boy shuddered,
and for the first time his dreams about his future were not as bright
as they had been.

One day there had come to the village a Frenchman, clad in the
picturesque garb of a voyageur, wearing a gaudy handkerchief about his
head and a gay capote, or blanket coat which the savages much admired.
With him was a half-breed woman and Louis, then not quite ten years
old. Conrad thought this boy the most attractive person he had ever
met a