l soundly asleep. It was midnight. The flickering
fire burned feebly. The night was dark. They were in the midst of an
apparently boundless forest. The favorable hour for an attempt to
escape had come. But it was full of peril. Failure was certain death,
for the Indians deemed it one of the greatest of all crimes for a
captive who had been treated with kindness to attempt to escape. A group
of fierce savages were sleeping around, each one of whom accustomed to
midnight alarms, was supposed to sleep, to use an expressive phrase,
"with one eye open." Boone, who had feigned sound slumber, cautiously
awoke his companion who was asleep and motioned him to follow. The
rustling of a leaf, the crackling of a twig, would instantly cause every
savage to grasp his bow and arrow and spring from the ground.
Fortunately the Indians had allowed their captives to retain their guns,
which had proved so valuable in obtaining game.
With step as light as the fall of a feather these men with moccasined
feet crept from the encampment. After a few moments of intense
solicitude, they found themselves in the impenetrable gloom of the
forest, and their captors still undisturbed. With vastly superior native
powers to the Indian, and equally accustomed to forest life, Boone was
in all respects their superior. With the instinct of the bee, he made a
straight line towards the encampment they had left, with the locality of
which the Indians were not acquainted. The peril which menaced them
added wings to their flight. It was mid-winter, and though not very
cold in that climate, fortunately for them, the December nights were
long.
Six precious hours would pass before the dawn of the morning would
struggle through the tree-tops. Till then the bewildered Indians could
obtain no clue whatever to the direction of their flight. Carefully
guarding against leaving any traces of their footsteps behind them, and
watching with an eagle eye lest they should encounter any other band of
savages, they pressed forward hour after hour with sinews apparently as
tireless as if they had been wrought of iron. When the fugitives reached
their camp they found it plundered and deserted. Whether the red men had
discovered it and carried off their companions as prisoners, or whether
the white men in a panic had destroyed what they could not remove and
had attempted a retreat to the settlements, was never known. It is
probable that in some way they perished in the wildernes
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