Wells’s face darkened.

“Have I ever been a coward,” he asked indignantly, “that I should turn and run for a threat?  Think you, Topenebe, that I fear to sing the death-song?  I have lived in the woods, and gone forth with your war-parties; am I less a warrior, now that I fight with the people of my own race?  Go take your warning to some squaw; we ride straight on to Dearborn, even though we have to fight our way.”

The Indian glanced, as Wells pointed, toward the Fort, and sneered.

“All old women in there,” he exclaimed derisively.  “Say this to-day, and that to-morrow.  They shut the gates now to keep Indian on outside.  No trade, no rum, no powder,—­just lies.  But they no keep back our young men much longer.”  His face grew dark, and his eyes angry.

“Why you bring them?” he asked hotly, designating our escort of Miamis, already shrinking from the taunts of the gathering braves.  “They dog Indians, bad medicine; they run fast when Pottawattomie come.”

“Don’t be so certain about that, Topenebe,” retorted Wells, shortly.  “But we cannot stop longer here; make way, that we may pass along, Jordan, push on with your advance through that rabble there.”

The Indian chief drew his horse back beside the trail, and we moved slowly forward, our Indian guides slightly in advance, and exhibiting in every action the disinclination they felt to proceed, and their constantly increasing fear of the wild horde that now resorted to every means in their power, short of actual violence, to retard their progress.  As they closed in more closely around us, taunting the Miamis unmercifully, even shaking tomahawks in their faces, with fierce eyes full of hatred and murder, I drew back my horse until I ranged up beside Mademoiselle Antoinette, and thus we rode steadily onward through that frenzied, howling mass, the girl between De Croix and me, who thus protected her on either side.

It was truly a weary ride, full of insult, and perchance of grave peril had we faced that naked mob less resolutely.  Doubtless the chiefs restrained their young men somewhat, but more than once we came within a hair’s-breadth of serious conflict.  They hemmed us in so tightly that we could only walk our horses; and twice they pressed upon Jordan so hard as to halt him altogether, bunching his cowardly Miamis, and even striking them contemptuously with their blackened sticks.  The second time this occurred, Captain Wells rode forward to force a path, driving the spurs into his horse so quickly that the startled animal fairly cut a lane through the crowded savages before they could draw back.  Naught restrained them from open violence but their knowledge of that stern-faced swarthy soldier who fronted them with such dauntless courage.  Hundreds in that swarm had seen him before, when, as the adopted son of a great war-chief of the Miamis he had been at their side in many a wild foray along the border.