up to my elbow in a pool. There came a second of sheer
terror, a hoarse challenge in French, and then I took to my heels and
flew towards the fort at the top of my speed.

I heard them coming after me, leap and bound, and crying out to one
another. Ahead of me there might have been a floor or a precipice, as
the ground looks level at night. I hurt my foot cruelly on a frozen clod
of earth, slid down the washed bank of a run into the Wabash, picked
myself up, scrambled to the top of the far side, and had gotten away
again when my pursuer shattered the ice behind me. A hundred yards more,
two figures loomed up in front, and I was pulled up choking.

"Hang to him, Fletcher!" said a voice.

"Great God!" cried Fletcher, "it's Davy. What are ye up to now?"

"Let me go!" I cried, as soon as I had got my wind. As luck would have
it, I had run into a pair of daredevil young Kentuckians who had more
than once tasted the severity of Clark's discipline,--Fletcher Blount
and Jim Willis. They fairly shook out of me what had happened, and then
dropped me with a war-whoop and started for the prairie, I after them,
crying out to them to beware of the run. A man must indeed be fleet
of foot to have escaped these young ruffians, and so it proved. When I
reached the hollow there were the two of them fighting with a man in the
water, the ice jangling as they shifted their feet.

"What's yere name?" said Fletcher, cuffing and kicking his prisoner
until he cried out for mercy.

"Maisonville," said the man, whereupon Fletcher gave a war-whoop and
kicked him again.

"That's no way to use a prisoner," said I, hotly.

"Hold your mouth, Davy," said Fletcher, "you didn't ketch him."

"You wouldn't have had him but for me," I retorted.

Fletcher's answer was an oath. They put Maisonville between them, ran
him through the town up to the firing line, and there, to my horror,
they tied him to a post and used him for a shield, despite his
heart-rending yells. In mortal fear that the poor man would be shot
down, I was running away to find some one who might have influence over
them when I met a lieutenant. He came up and ordered them angrily to
unbind Maisonville and bring him before the Colonel. Fletcher laughed,
whipped out his hunting knife, and cut the thongs; but he and Willis
had scarce got twenty paces from the officer before they seized poor
Maisonville by the hair and made shift to scalp him. This was merely
backwoods play, had Maison