air defeated the Governor's attempt to steal his trade,
and later on published the whole story in the Charleston press and sent
in a statement of his claims to the Assembly, with frank observations
on His Excellency himself. We gather that his bold disregard of High
Personages set all Charleston in an uproar!

Adair is tantalizingly modest about his own deeds. He devotes pages to
prove that an Indian rite agrees with the Book of Leviticus but only a
paragraph to an exploit of courage and endurance such as that ride and
swim for the Indian trade. We have to read between the lines to find the
man; but he well repays the search. Briefly, incidentally, he mentions
that on one trip he was captured by the French, who were so,

"well acquainted with the great damages I had done to them and feared
others I might occasion, as to confine me a close prisoner ... in the
Alebahma garrison. They were fully resolved to have sent me down to
Mobile or New Orleans as a capital criminal to be hanged... BUT I DOUBTED
NOT OF BEING ABLE TO EXTRICATE MYSELF SOME WAY OR OTHER. They appointed
double centries over me for some days before I was to be sent down in
the French King's large boat. They were strongly charged against laying
down their weapons or suffering any hostile thing to be in the place
where I was kept, as they deemed me capable of any mischief.... About an
hour before we were to set off by water I escaped from them by land....
I took through the middle of the low land covered with briers at full
speed. I heard the French clattering on horseback along the path... and
the howling savages pursuing..., but MY USUAL GOOD FORTUNE enabled me to
leave them far enough behind...."

One feels that a few of the pages given up to Leviticus might well have
been devoted to a detailed account of this escape from "double centries"
and a fortified garrison, and the plunge through the tangled wilds, by
a man without gun or knife or supplies, and who for days dared not show
himself upon the trail.

There is too much of "my usual good fortune" in Adair's narrative; such
luck as his argues for extraordinary resources in the man. Sometimes
we discover only through one phrase on a page that he must himself have
been the hero of an event he relates in the third person. This seems
to be the case in the affair of Priber, which was the worst of those
"damages" Adair did to the French. Priber was "a gentleman of curious
and speculative temper" sent by t