"Silence!" cried Clark, and turned again to the cowering Saunders. "You
pretend to know the way to Kaskaskia, you bring us to the middle of the
Indian country where we may be wiped out at any time, and now you have
the damned effrontery to tell me that you have lost your way. I am a man
of my word," he added with a vibrant intensity, and pointed to the limbs
of a giant tree which stood at the edge of the distant forest. "I will
give you half an hour, but as I live, I will leave you hanging there."

The man's brown hand trembled as he clutched his rifle barrel.

"'Tis a hard country, sir," he said. "I'm lost. I swear it on the
evangels."

"A hard country!" cried Clark. "A man would have to walk over it but
once to know it. I believe you are a damned traitor and perjurer,--in
spite of your oath, a British spy."

Saunders wiped the sweat from his brow on his buckskin sleeve.

"I reckon I could get the trace, Colonel, if you'd let me go a little way
into the prairie."

"Half an hour," said Clark, "and you'll not go alone." Sweeping his eye
over Bowman's company, he picked out a man here and a man there to go
with Saunders. Then his eye lighted on me. "Where's McChesney?" he
said. "Fetch McChesney."

I ran to get Tom, and seven of them went away, with Saunders in the
middle, Clark watching them like a hawk, while the men sat down in the