Fortunately for the captured boy three of the settlers had chosen this day to return to the abandoned clearing and look after the loose stock.  They reached the place shortly after the Indians, and just in time to hear the report of the rifle when the hog was shot.  The owner of the hogs, instead of suspecting that there were Indians near by, jumped to the conclusion that a Kentucky boat had landed, and that the immigrants were shooting his hogs—­for the people who drifted down the Ohio in boats were not, when hungry, over-scrupulous concerning the right to stray live stock.  Running forward, the three men had almost reached the river, when they heard the loud snorting of one of the horses as it was forced into the water.  As they came out on the bank they saw the canoe, with three Indians in it, and in the bottom four rifles, the dead hog, and young Wetzel stretched at full length; the Indian in the stern was just pushing off from the shore with his paddle; the fourth Indian was swimming the horses a few yards from shore.  Immediately the foremost white man threw up his rifle and shot the paddler dead; and a second later one of his companions coming up, killed in like fashion the Indian in the bow of the canoe.  The third Indian, stunned by the sudden onslaught, sat as if numb, never so much as lifting one of the rifles that lay at his feet, and in a minute he too was shot and fell over the side of the canoe, but grasped the gunwale with one hand, keeping himself afloat.  Young Wetzel, in the bottom of the canoe, would have shared the same fate, had he not cried out that he was white and a prisoner; whereupon they bade him knock loose the Indian’s hand from the side of the canoe.  This he did, and the Indian sank.  The current carried the canoe on a rocky spit of land, and Wetzel jumped out and waded ashore, while the little craft spun off and again drifted towards midstream.  One of the men on shore now fired at the only remaining Indian, who was still swimming his horse for the opposite bank.  The bullet splashed the water on his naked skin, whereat he slipped off his horse, swam to the empty canoe, and got into it.  Unhurt he reached the farther shore, where he leaped out and caught the horse as it swam to land, mounted it, rifle in hand, turned to yell defiance at his foes, and then vanished in the forest-shrouded wilderness.  He left behind him the dead bodies of his three friends, to be washed on the shallows by the turbid flood of the great river. [Footnote:  De Haas, pp. 283-292.  De Haas gathered the facts of these and numerous similar incidents from the pioneers themselves in their old age; doubtless they are often inaccurate in detail, but on the whole De Haas has more judgment and may be better trusted than the other compilers.  In the Draper MSS. are volumes of such traditional stories, gathered with no discrimination whatever.]

    Monotonous Horror of the Ravages.