The Ozark spectator., 1917-02-14
CHAPTER xv.
On Wildcat Creek.

VII VvnOSaA SiSVNs
 Toinette was dead. The news came to David and left him without hope or aim or wish for life. One of the Indian prisoners told the horrible story of her death to his captors, with a gleam of fiendish malevolence in his eyes.
 David shuddered as he had not among all the carnage of battle, and his limbs tottered beneath him. Some one of the soldiers raised up his rifle and struck down the boaster as if he were crushing a snake. No one held back his hand.
 One, with awkward sympathy, put his hand on the shoulder of the shaken David and led him back to the American camp. Behind them the ruined village lay smoldering in the November sun; but David himself walked as in a dream. Men who met him stepped aside in silence, to let him pass, daring to ask no question. Behind him rose the wailing of the Indian women, mourning for their dead, wailing among the trampled maize; and the unutterable sorrow in his heart grew heavier beneath their intending lamentation as the stalks of corn are beaten to the sodden ground in the cold rains of the dying year.
 Mechanically he took up his work of watching over the wounded in the heavy wagons. The camp was struck, the homeward journey begun.
 The suffering of the men in the wagons was torture indescribable. Over the uneven ground the oxen dragged the numbering carts, the wooden disks that served as wheels slipping and jolting over rocks and into ditches with cruelty which was no less heartrending because it was unavoidable. The carts were spring less. Hot with fever under the icy wind and racked with the terrific jolt ing, the wounded men raved, cursed, sang in delirium. Of the 151 wounded, 9 died on the merciless journey from the battlefield to the blockhouse on the Vermilion river, where the boats had been left. Day and night David heard their pitiful moaning. the snatches of pleadings. the impreca- tions and the incoherent wanderings of their tortured minds:
 "A tubful of honey in the lean-to and the bear got it''-"That ball went through the hoop'-"Make the stock ade higher'-"From Kaskasky with Georgie Clark. I, tell ye"-'The An gel Gabriel set his feet on those stones"-"That calf's got the milk sick"-"No, dearie, there ain't no more meal"-"Teacher, may I get fresh quill !-"Fm a old man an I want some whisky'-"All the Federalists' seheming" ain't there even some rainwaterY'-"Oh, Molly. Molly, Molly !-'Watch the right flank The right flank !"-"Water Water!" Three miles below Tippecanoe the fleeing Prophet made a nights camp on Wildcat creek, the Panse Pichou of the French. Dubois scouts found the warm ashes of his campfire there and close by one of the guides picked up bit of lace. The man put it in the pocket of his shirt and brought it back to the marching column. David was among the men who crowded about him to gaze at the tiny shred Of cloth; and having seen it he put out his hand and took it, and no man said him no; for they saw that he had recognized 1t as part of gar ment of Antoinette OBannon, whom he had loved and who was slain. Will lingly the man who had found the cloth led David, at his request, back to the ashes of the fire and there left him in silence; and for long time David stood looking at the ground where Toinette's feet last had been.
 The frozen wilderness was very still. The bare branches of the forest creaked and groaned in the November gusts, but there was no sound of hu- man life. On dead limb a mottled woodpecker with scarlet cap searched industriously and vainly for it's food. A sleek, brown-furred bea- yer crawled to the top of the streams bank. looked inquiringly at the mo- tionless figure breeding over the ashes of the fire, and slid back into the wa l NNA "'sh spiaSh. DSSP III tic WOOuS a flock of wild turkeys clucked among the underbrush. And so standing, Da- vid tasted to the dregs the bitterness of his failure, the numbing conscious ness of irremediable loss; tasted the bitterness of helpless defeat and spent his hour of agony and vain self reproach, while the grim forest shut him in with silence.
 A rife cracked.
 The ball knocked the cap from Da- vid's head. An inch to the right and he would have fallen, his skull shat tered; but he had bent his head mt the very moment when the hidden marksman's finger pressed the trigger.
 He was all alone; only his own speed and quickness of resource saved him.
 CTo BE coNTINUED.)