o think
Manitou hostile to them, but the leaders persisted with the siege. They
wished to destroy utterly this white vanguard, and they would not return
to their villages, far across the Ohio, until it was done.

They no longer made a direct attack upon the walls, but, forming a
complete circle around, hung about at a convenient distance, waiting and
hoping for thirst and famine to help them. The people believed
themselves to have taken good precautions against these twin evils, but
now a terrible misfortune befell them. No rain fell and the well inside
the palisade ran dry. It was John Ware himself who first saw the coming
of the danger and he tried to hide it, but it could not, from its very
nature, be kept a secret long. The supply for each person was cut down
one half and then one fourth, and that too would soon go, unless the
welcome rains came; and the sky was without a cloud. Men who feared no
physical danger saw those whom they loved growing pale and weak before
their eyes, and they knew not what to do. It seemed that the place must
fall without a blow from the enemy.

CHAPTER XVI

A GIRL'S WAY

Lucy left her father's house one of these dry mornings, and stood for a
few moments in the grounds, inclosed by the palisade, gazing at the dark
forest, outlined so sharply against the blue of the sky. She could see
the green of the forest beyond the fort, and she knew that in the open
spaces, where the sun reached them, tiny wild flowers of pink and
purple, nestled low in the grass, were already in bloom. From the west a
wind sweet and soft was blowing, and, as she inhaled it, she wanted to
live, and she wanted all those about her to live. She wondered, if there
was not some way in which she could help.

The stout, double log cabins, rude, but full of comfort, stood in rows,
with well-trodden streets, between, then a fringe of grass around all,
and beyond that rose the palisade of stout stakes, driven deep into the
ground, and against each other. All was of the West and so was Lucy, a
tall, lithe young girl, her face tanned a healthy and becoming brown by
the sun, her clothing of home-woven red cloth, adorned at the wrists and
around the bottom of the skirt with many tiny beads of red and yellow
and blue and green, which, when she moved, flashed in the brilliant
light, like the quivering colors of a prism. She had thrust in her hair
a tiny plume of the scarlet tanager, and it lay there, like a flash of
fla