pped his gun. Mine had none.
The place was very thick with canes, and being so much elated on
recovering the three broken-hearted girls, prevented our making further
search. We sent them off without their mocassins, and not one of them
with so much as a knife or a tomahawk."

The Indians seemed to awake increasingly to the consciousness that the
empire of the white man in their country could only exist upon the ruins
of their own. They divided themselves into several parties, making
incessant attacks upon the forts, and prowling around to shoot every
white man who could be found within reach of their bullets. They avoided
all open warfare, and fought only when they could spring from an ambush,
or when protected by a stump, a rock, or a tree. An Indian would conceal
himself in the night behind a stump, shoot the first one who emerged
from the fort in the morning, and then with a yell disappear in the
recesses of the forest. The cattle could scarcely appear for an hour to
graze beyond the protection of the fort, without danger of being struck
down by the bullet of an unseen foe.

The war of the American Revolution was just commencing. Dreadfully it
added to the perils of these distant emigrants. The British Government,
with infamy which can never be effaced from her records, called in to
her aid the tomahawk and the scalping knife of the savage. The Indian
alone in his wild and merciless barbarity, was terrible enough. But when
he appeared as the ally of a powerful nation, guided in his operations
by the wisdom of her officers, and well provided with guns, powder, and
bullets from inexhaustible resources, the settler had indeed reason to
tremble. The winter of 1776 and 1777 was gloomy beyond expression. The
Indians were hourly becoming more bold. Their predatory bands were
wandering in all directions, and almost every day came fraught with
tidings of outrage or massacre.

The whole military force of the colony was but about one hundred men.
Three hundred of the pioneers, dismayed by the cloud of menace, every
hour growing blacker, had returned across the moutains. There were but
twenty-two armed men left in the fort at Boonesborough. The dismal
winter passed slowly away, and the spring opened replete with nature's
bloom and beauty, but darkened by the depravity of man. On the fifteenth
of April, a band of a hundred howling Indians appeared in the forest
before Boonesborough. With far more than their ordinary audacity, t