torture, with a second backwater facing us coated with a full
inch of ice.

And still there was nothing to eat.

CHAPTER XIX. THE HAIR BUYER TRAPPED

To lie the night on adamant, pierced by the needles of the frost; to
awake shivering and famished, until the meaning of an inch of ice on
the backwater comes to your mind,--these are not calculated to put a man
into an equable mood to listen to oratory. Nevertheless there was a
kind of oratory to fit the case. To picture the misery of these men
is well-nigh impossible. They stood sluggishly in groups, dazed by
suffering, and their faces were drawn and their eyes ringed, their
beards and hair matted. And many found it in their hearts to curse Clark
and that government for which he fought.

When the red fire of the sun glowed through the bare branches that
morning, it seemed as if the campaign had spent itself like an arrow
which drops at the foot of the mark. Could life and interest and
enthusiasm be infused again in such as these? I have ceased to marvel
how it was done. A man no less haggard than the rest, but with a
compelling force in his eyes, pointed with a blade to the hills across
the river. They must get to them, he said, and their troubles would be
ended. He said more, and they cheered him. These are the bare facts. He
picked a man here, and another there, and these went silently to a grim
duty behind the regiment.

"If any try to go back, shoot them down!" he cried.

Then with a gun-butt he shattered the ice and was the first to leap
into the water under it. They followed, some with a cheer that was most
pitiful of all. They followed him blindly, as men go to torture, but
they followed him, and the splashing and crushing of the ice were sounds
to freeze my body. I was put in a canoe. In my day I have beheld great
suffering and hardship, and none of it compared to this. Torn with pity,
I saw them reeling through the water, now grasping trees and bushes
to try to keep their feet, the strongest breaking the way ahead and
supporting the weak between them. More than once Clark himself tottered
where he beat the ice at the apex of the line. Some swooned and would
have drowned had they not been dragged across the canoe and chafed back
to consciousness. By inches the water shallowed. Clark reached the high
ground, and then Bill Cowan, with a man on each shoulder. Then others
endured to the shallows to fall heavily in the crumbled ice and be
dragged out before