e enemy.

I had not had a chance to talk to Captain Stark for a long time, and
when we camped at Crown Point, I went over to his quarters. He took me
into his hut and gave me a pipe.

[Sidenote: A FOOLISH ERRAND]

"I'm glad to see you, Comee. It's been some time since we met, and I
shall not see you again this campaign. I received orders to-day to take
two hundred men and cut a path through the woods to Fort No. 4. I am
very glad of it, for it will take me out of a fix I should have been in,
if I had remained here."

"How's that, Captain John?"

"General Amherst has sent Captain Kennedy and some other officers to try
and gain over the St. Francis Indians. I think it is a foolish errand,
which will breed trouble. I don't want to fight them. That is, I don't
mind fighting them, if they come down here, spoiling for a row. But I
don't want to go and attack them in their own region, for I am a member
of that tribe: I was adopted by them. You never suspected that I was a
full-fledged Indian warrior, did you, Ben?"

"No, indeed. How in the world can that be?"

"When I grew up, I went trapping and hunting at Baker's River, in the
spring of 1752, with David Stinson, Amos Eastman, and my brother
William. We made a camp with bark and boughs. There was plenty of game,
and we trapped over L500 worth of furs before the first of April. On the
twenty-seventh day of that month we saw the tracks of Indians, and
decided to get out of that region at once. I was twenty-three years old,
the youngest of our party, and was sent to take up the traps."

"Seems to me, Captain John, if I had L500 of furs, and saw tracks of
Indians, I'd have lit out with my furs, and not waited to pick up
traps."

"That would have been the right thing to do. That's what a sensible man
would have done. But if you had been there, you'd probably have been
just as big a fool as we were. You see if we had come back without our
traps, some one in the settlements would have been sure to laugh at the
scare we had over nothing. And we were young idiots, and took the risk.

"Just about sunset, I was stooping over the water, taking up a trap,
when I heard a sound like 'O whish!' I looked up, and saw several
redskins pointing their guns at me.

[Sidenote: THE CAPTIVES]

"They asked me where our camp was, and I led them two miles away from it
up the river.

"As I did not return to camp, the boys began to fire their guns to call
me back. The Indians ran through