floundering into ponds, yet going as quietly as I could, turning now and
again to look back at the distant glow or to listen to the rifles popping
around the fort. The night was cloudy and pitchy dark. Twice the
whirring of startled waterfowl frightened me out of my senses, but
ambition pricked me on in spite of fear. I may have gone a mile thus,
perchance two or three, straining every sense, when a sound brought me to
a stand. At first I could not distinguish it because of my heavy
breathing, but presently I made sure that it was the low drone of human
voices. Getting down on my hands and knees, I crept forward, and felt
the ground rising. The voices had ceased. I gained the crest of a low
ridge, and threw myself flat. A rattle of musketry set me shivering, and
in an agony of fright I looked behind me to discover that I could not be
more than four hundred yards from the fort. I had made a circle. I lay
very still, my eyes watered with staring, and then--the droning began
again. I went forward an inch, then another and another down the slope,
and at last I could have sworn that I saw dark blurs against the ground.
I put out my hand, my weight went after, and I had crashed through a
coating of ice up to my elbow in a pool. There came a second of sheer
terror, a hoarse challenge in French, and then I took to my heels and
flew towards the fort at the top of my speed.

I heard them coming after me, leap and bound, and crying out to one
another. Ahead of me there might have been a floor or a precipice, as
the ground looks level at night. I hurt my foot cruelly on a frozen clod
of earth, slid down the washed bank of a run into the Wabash, picked
myself up, scrambled to the top of the far side, and had gotten away
again when my pursuer shattered the ice behind me. A hundred yards more,
two figures loomed up in front, and I was pulled up choking.

"Hang to him, Fletcher!" said a voice.