of the great chief Joseph Brant. These Indians
never gave the Americans a minute's rest. They were up
at all hours, pressing round the flanks, sniping the
sentries, worrying the outposts, and keeping four times
their own numbers on the perpetual alert. What exasperated
the Americans even more was the wonderfully elusive way
in which the Indians would strike their blow and then be
lost to sight and sound the very next moment, if, indeed,
they ever were seen at all. Finally, this endless skirmish
with an invisible foe became so harassing that the
Americans sent out a flying column of six hundred picked
men under Colonel Boerstler on June 24 to break up
FitzGibbon's post at the Beaver Dams and drive the Indians
out of the intervening bush altogether.

But the American commanders had not succeeded in hiding
their preparations from the vigilant eyes of the Indian
scouts or from the equally attentive ears of Laura Secord,
the wife of an ardent U. E. Loyalist, James Secord, who
was still disabled by the wounds he had received when
fighting under Brock's command at Queenston Heights.
Early in the morning of the 23rd, while Laura Secord was
going out to milk the cows, she overheard some Americans
talking about the surprise in store for FitzGibbon next
day. Without giving the slightest sign she quietly drove
the cattle in behind the nearest fence, hid her milk-pail,
and started to thread her perilous way through twenty
miles of bewildering bypaths to the Beaver Dams. Keeping
off the beaten tracks and always in the shadow of the
full-leaved trees, she stole along through the American
lines, crossed the no-man's-land between the two desperate
enemies, and managed to get inside the ever-shifting
fringe of Indian scouts without being seen by friend or
foe. The heat was intense; and the whole forest steamed
with it after the tropical rain. But she held her course
without a pause, over the swollen streams on fallen
tree-trunks, through the dense underbrush, and in and
out of the mazes of the forest, where a bullet might come
from either side without a moment's warning. As she neared
the end of her journey a savage yell told her she was at
last discovered by the Indians. She and they were on the
same side; but she had hard work to persuade them that
she only wished to warn FitzGibbon. Then came what, to
a lesser patriot, would have been a crowning disappointment.
For when, half dead with fatigue, she told him her story,
she foun