t against the Indian's
breast, pulled the trigger, and killed him. The remaining two followed
him a mile farther, and then Wetzel shot one of them as he was crossing
a piece of open ground. The last left of the Indians stopped with a
yell, and Wetzel heard him say as he turned back, "No catch that man;
gun always loaded."

Wetzel had fought Indians nearly all his life. When he was a boy of
fourteen they attacked his father's cabin in Virginia, and Wetzel
was wounded before he was taken prisoner, with a younger brother, and
carried into the Ohio wilderness. One night the Indians forgot to tie
their captives, and the two boys escaped. Lewis returned to the camp,
after they had stolen away, for a pair of moccasins, and again for his
father's rifle, which the Indians had carried off. They followed the
boys, but the young Wetzels got safely back to the Ohio, and crossed the
river on a raft which they made of logs.

[Illustration: Wetzel, Indian Fighter 122]

In 1786 the settlers of Wheeling, who had been troubled by Indians,
offered a purse of a hundred dollars to the man who should first bring
in a scalp. A party crossed the Ohio, but after some days turned back,
leaving Wetzel alone in the woods, where he roamed about looking for
Indians. The second morning he came upon one sleeping, and drove his
knife through his heart. Then he went home with his scalp, and got the
reward.

One of the tricks of the savages was to imitate the cry, or call, of the
wild turkey and then to shoot the hunter who came looking for the bird.
Wetzel was one day in the woods when this call came to his ear from the
mouth of a cave, a place where several whites had been found scalped.
He watched till the feathered tuft of an Indiana head appeared from
the cave. The call of the wild turkey sounded, and at the same time the
sharp crack of Wetzel's rifle noted the Indian's death.

It was Wetzel's habit in the autumn to go on a long hunt into the Ohio
country. Once he went as far as the Muskingum, some ninety miles from
Wheeling, when he came on a camp of four Indians. He crept upon them
with no weapon but his knife, which he drove through the skulls of two
as they lay asleep. The two others struggled to their feet stupefied;
Wetzel killed one of them, but the fourth escaped in the shadow of the
woods. When Wetzel returned and was asked what his luck in hunting had
been, he said, "Not much; I treed four Indians, but one got away."

These were acts