ll he was more than half-way across the plain, and could tell
from the fading uproar that he was outdistancing his hunters. Perhaps it
was the last look of despair; but it spurred the jaded racer to
redoubled efforts. All the Indians had been left to the rear but one,
who was only a hundred yards behind.

There was, then, a racing chance of escape! Colter let out in a burst of
renewed speed that brought blood gushing over his face, while the cactus
spines cut his naked feet like knives. The river was in sight. A mile
more, he would be in the wood! But the Indian behind was gaining at
every step. Another backward look! The savage was not thirty yards away!
He had poised his spear to launch it in Colter's back, when the white
man turned fagged and beaten, threw up his arms and stopped!

This is an Indian _ruse_ to arrest the pursuit of a wild beast. By force
of habit it stopped the Indian too, and disconcerted him so that instead
of launching his spear, he fell flat on his face, breaking the shaft in
his hand. With a leap, Colter had snatched up the broken point and
pinned the savage through the body to the earth.

That intercepted the foremost of the other warriors, who stopped to
rescue their brave and gave Colter time to reach the river.

In he plunged, fainting and dazed, swimming for an island in mid-current
where driftwood had formed a sheltered raft. Under this he dived, coming
up with his head among branches of trees.

* * * * *

All that day the Blackfeet searched the island for Colter, running from
log to log of the drift; but the close-grown brushwood hid the white
man. At night he swam down-stream like any other hunted animal that
wants to throw pursuers off the trail, went ashore and struck across
country, seven days' journey for the Missouri Company's fort on the
Bighorn River.

Naked and unarmed, he succeeded in reaching the distant fur post, having
subsisted entirely on roots and berries.

* * * * *

Chittenden says that poor Colter's adventure only won for him in St.
Louis the reputation of a colossal liar. But traditions of his escape
were current among all hunters and Indian tribes on the Missouri, so
that when Bradbury, the English scientist, went west with the Astorians
in 1811, he sifted the matter, accepted it as truth, and preserved the
episode for history in a small-type foot-note to his book published in
London in 1817.

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