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"His eyes weren't anything as good as mine. But he says: "'Certainly. Certainly. You did quite right. "And it's a fact I had seen some drift-logs at sunset. I saw what they were then and didn't trouble my head about them, forgot all about it till that very moment. Nothing strange in seeing drift-logs off a coast like that; and I'm hanged if the skipper didn't make one out in the wake of the moon.
He explained that one of them had been left in camp at a considerable distance from that point, while he and the third had been rowing along the shore of the island in opposite directions, searching for drift-logs. Thus he alone had discovered the stranded raft. Now he wished to bring them to that point, that they might see it for themselves before he explained the proposed wheat deal.
"My orders were to learn and report what was going on on the right, particularly to try and form an idea of the enemy's force in front of M. L. Smith's division, and at the sand-bar. Leaving my horse close in the rear of the Sixth Missouri, when the fire became too heavy for riding, I succeeded, by taking frequent cover, in reaching unhurt the verge of the bayou among the drift-logs.
Feverishly, Gerald Ainley began to wade round its wide base; and the Indian also joined in the search, poking among the drift-logs and occasionally tumbling one aside. Then the Indian gave a sharp grunt, and out of the pile dragged a piece of wreckage that was obviously part of the side and bow of a canoe.
Avoiding the loopholes, which were making on every side of the igloo, they emptied the skins on the dry drift-logs brought down by the Mandell River from the tree-lands to the south. Ounenk ran forward with a blazing brand, and the flames leaped upward. Many minutes passed, without sign, and they held their weapons ready as the fire gained headway.
This is a truth which kings and men, not intending to be drift-logs or waste brine obedient to the Moon, are much called to have in mind withal, from perhaps an early stage of their voyage.
It would, perhaps, be prudent to find Nicholas first of all. But where was Nicholas? where was anybody? The scattered, half-buried huts were more like earth-mounds, snow-encrusted, some with drift-logs propped against the front face looking riverwards.
Here they constructed a "raft", by tying half-a-dozen drift-logs together, and warning them that death would be the penalty of a return, they placed their prisoners upon it, pushed it into the middle of the stream, and set them adrift without oar or pole!
By trailing them to the water's edge, they discovered the very spot where the canoes of the savages had been secreted on the beach, behind some drift-logs, nearly opposite the mouth of the Great Miami.
The rocks and bleached drift-logs, extending some way into the shaggy woods, showed a rise and fall of six or eight feet, caused partly by the dam at the outlet. They said that in winter the snow was three feet deep on a level here, and sometimes four or five, that the ice on the lake was two feet thick, clear, and four feet, including the snow-ice. Ice had already formed in vessels.
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