,
would abandon the country. Instead of that, with amazing recuperative
power, they had scarcely reached their homes ere another army, utterly
resistless in numbers, is burning their towns and destroying their whole
country.

This avenging campaign so depressed the Indians that they made no
farther attempt for the organised invasion of Kentucky. The termination
of the war with England also deprived them of their military resources,
and left them to their own unaided and unintelligent efforts. Still
miserable bands continued prowling around, waylaying and murdering the
lonely traveler, setting fire to the solitary hut and inflicting such
other outrages as were congenial with their cruel natures. It thus
became necessary for the pioneers always to live with the rifle in hand.

Colonel Boone had become especially obnoxious to the Indians. Twice he
had escaped from them, under circumstances which greatly mortified their
vanity. They recognised the potency of his rifle in the slaughter of
their own warriors at the Blue Lick; and they were well aware that it
was his sagacity which led the army of General Clarke in its avenging
march through their country. It thus became with them an object of
intense desire to take him prisoner, and had he been taken, he would
doubtless have been doomed to the severest torture they could inflict.

Mr. Peck, in his interesting life of Boone, gives the following account
of one of the extraordinary adventures of this man, which he received
from the lips of Colonel Boone himself. On one occasion, four Indians
suddenly appeared before his cabin and took him prisoner. Though the
delicacy of Colonel Boone's organization was such, that he could never
himself relish tobacco in any form, he still raised some for his friends
and neighbors, and for what were then deemed the essential rites of
hospitality.

"As a shelter for curing the tobacco, he had built an enclosure of rails
a dozen feet in height and covered with canes and grass. Stalks of
tobacco are generally split and strung on sticks about four feet in
length. The ends of these are laid on poles placed across the tobacco
house, and in tiers one above another, to the roof. Boone had fixed his
temporary shelter in such a manner as to have three tiers. He had
covered the lower tier and the tobacco had become dry; when he entered
the shelter for the purpose of removing the sticks to the upper tier,
preparatory to gathering the remainder of the cr