hoicest cuts as they could carry, they returned
to the encampment to find the Indians in a famished condition. Ahneota
for the two previous days had given his allowance of food to the
children.

The winter, what with hunting and trapping, passed quickly. The wild,
free life with all its hardships and annoyances appealed to Rodney,
and he came to understand how children taken captives by the Indians,
and later returned to their parents, would occasionally run away and
rejoin the red folk. His home ties were too strong, however, for him
to entertain such a thought, and he lay awake many nights wondering
how he might make his escape.

The severity of the winter had greatly weakened Ahneota. The skin was
drawn over his cheekbones like parchment. He was so lame with
rheumatism that he needed constant care and the boy served him in many
ways.

The hunters, though few in number, had gathered a fine lot of furs,
and, when the ice was breaking up in the streams, the sugar maples
were tapped. Their implements for this purpose were crude. Their
method consisted in cutting a gash through the bark with a tomahawk
and into this driving a chip which served as a "spile" to conduct the
dripping sap into the dishes of elm bark, from which it was taken and
boiled into sugar. This sugar was often mixed with bear's fat and
stored in sacks made of skins, a mixture much prized by the Indians.

A little later the tribe returned to the bluff where Rodney was first
introduced to its life, there to plant the corn and tobacco.

Rumours of trouble with the whites increased. The latter part of May
Francois returned, but without Maman and Louis, and he brought, to
trade for the valuable furs, rifles and ammunition and brandy, and
waxed rich, while the savages with their new implements of war became
more restless.

CHAPTER XIII

THE BEGINNING OF WAR

From the history of those days one learns that there were white
savages who compared unfavourably with the red ones.

Of such were those border ruffians who, tempting the family of a
friendly Indian with liquor till they were stupefied with drink,
murdered them.

The Indian chief returned to find them weltering in blood. He was an
Iroquois who had moved his family from New York to the Ohio River.

His Indian name was Tahgahjute, but he was commonly called Logan from
the fact that he had in early life lived with a white family of that
name. Ever after he had been a staunch friend of