e was a different being from the shouting boy who had led the games
and the war-dance that night in the circle of the blaze. Tired out, we
went to sleep with the ring of the axes in our ears, and in the morning
there were more games while the squad crossed the river to the drowned
neck, built a rough scaffold there, and notched a trail across it; to
the scaffold the baggage was ferried, and the next morning, bit by bit,
the regiment. Even now the pains shoot through my body when I think
of how man after man plunged waist-deep into the icy water toward the
farther branch. The pirogue was filled with the weak, and in the end of
it I was curled up with my drum.

Heroism is a many-sided thing. It is one matter to fight and finish,
another to endure hell's tortures hour after hour. All day they waded
with numbed feet vainly searching for a footing in the slime. Truly, the
agony of a brave man is among the greatest of the world's tragedies to
see. As they splashed onward through the tree-trunks, many a joke went
forth, though lips were drawn and teeth pounded together. I have not
the heart to recall these jokes,--it would seem a sacrilege. There were
quarrels, too, the men striving to push one another from the easier
paths; and deeds sublime when some straggler clutched at the bole of
a tree for support, and was helped onward through excruciating ways.
A dozen held tremblingly to the pirogue's gunwale, lest they fall
and drown. One walked ahead with a smile, or else fell back to lend a
helping shoulder to a fainting man.

And there was Tom McChesney. All day long I watched him, and thanked God
that Polly Ann could not see him thus. And yet, how the pride would have
leaped within her! Humor came not easily to him, but charity and courage
and unselfishness he had in abundance. What he suffered none knew; but
through those awful hours he was always among the stragglers, helping
the weak and despairing when his strength might have taken him far
ahead toward comfort and safety. "I'm all right, Davy," he would say, in
answer to my look as he passed me. But on his face was written something
that I did not understand.

How the Creole farmers and traders, unused even to the common ways of
woodcraft, endured that fearful day and others that followed, I know
not. And when a tardy justice shall arise and compel the people of this
land to raise a shaft in memory of Clark and those who followed him, let
not the loyalty of the French be f