ied clubs, arrows, muskets. I was to give them the signal for
war.

I tried to rise. I was up on my knees. I fell back. I tried again.
My muscles did not obey. I saw the war club of the Indian beside me.
My hands stole out to it. A blow on my own head would end matters. My
hands closed on the handle of the club.

Then the savage next me stirred. That roused me. The insanity was
over, and sweat rained from me at realization of my weakness,--the
weakness that always traps a man unsure of his values, his judgment.
When men say that a man's life is not his own to take, I am not sure.
But that had nothing to do with me now. I was not a man in the sense
of having a man's free volition. When I had given up human claims for
myself, I had ceased to exist as an independent agent. It was only by
knowing that I was a tool that I could keep myself alive.

And so I sat upon my knees and whispered to the Indians about me. They
whispered in turn, and soon three hundred men were waked and ready.

Yet the forest scarcely rustled.

I motioned, and the line started. We crept some twenty paces from tree
to tree. Then ahead of us I saw an opening. I could distinguish the
outlines of a rough redoubt.

I stepped in front and stopped a moment. It had grown light enough for
me to see the faces of the Sac warriors. Dirt-crusted, red-eyed,
wolfish, they awaited my signal.

I raised my sword. "Ready!" I called. An inferno of yells arose. We
ran at the top of our speed. We charged the stake-built redoubt with
knives in hands. Mingled with our war cry I heard the screams of the
awakening camp.

I reached the palings. They were of bass wood, roughly split and
tough. I could not scale them with my lame shoulder. I seized a
hatchet from an Indian, struck the stakes, wrenched one free, and
climbed through the hole.

The camp was in an uproar. A few Sacs had scaled the redoubt ahead of
me, and one of them was grappling with a Seneca just in my path. I
dodged them and ran on. Behind me I heard the terrible roar of the
blood-hungry army.

I fought my way on. Warriors and slaves rose before me and screamed at
my knife, and at something that was in my face. I did not touch them.
I had to find the woman. She might be hiding in one of the huts. But
there were many bark huts, and all alike. I ran on.

The air was thickening with powder smoke, and the taste of blood was in
my throat. A hatchet whistled by me and cu