military stores
must have been received with somewhat mixed feelings. On the one hand,
his boyish love of adventure would be amply satisfied, while, on the
other, there were risks to be faced which might well have caused more
than uneasiness to many an older man--risks which the boy's
acquaintances possibly were at no pains to conceal, which, indeed, a few
of them would probably take pleasure in painting in the gloomiest of
colours. But duty was duty, and the lad had too great a share of Border
stubbornness and grit to let himself be badly scared by such tales as
were told to him.

The destination of the convoy was Fort Detroit. In those far-off days
New York was but a little city of some twenty thousand inhabitants, and
the western part of New York State was quite outside the bounds of
civilisation. To reach the Canadian frontier there were then two great
routes of military communication--one, up the Hudson River, and so by
way of Lakes George and Champlain and down the Richelieu to the St.
Lawrence; the other, by the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, then by way of
Lake Oneida and the Oswego River to the first of the great lakes, Lake
Ontario; thence the journey to Fort Detroit would be chiefly by canoe,
up Lakes Ontario and Erie. Between the last military post at the head of
the Mohawk, however, and the mouth of the Oswego River, there was a
great gap in which no military post had been established. Thus the route
of the convoy to which Kerr was attached necessarily took them through
country overrun by hostile Indian tribes.

No mishap, however, befell the party; probably they were too strong, too
wary and well skilled in Indian warfare, to give the enemy a chance of
ambushing or taking them by surprise on their march through the woods.

At Fort Detroit, it was found that a small exploring party, under a
Captain Robson, was about to set out with the object of determining
whether or not certain rivers and lakes were navigable, and young Kerr,
boylike, eagerly volunteered to join the expedition.

Here began his strange adventures. The party, all told, consisted but of
eleven persons--Captain Robson, Sir Robert Davers, six soldiers, two
sailors, and young Kerr. Apparently they did not think it necessary to
take with them any colonists, or Indian scouts. It is a curious
characteristic of the average Britisher who finds himself in a new land,
that he appears to regard it as an axiom that he must necessarily know
much more than