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He flexed his muscles once more, felt that they were elastic and powerful, and then he put his ear to the earth. He heard a sound which was not the scuttling of a lizard nor the low drone of insects, but one that he ascribed to the slow creeping of a Wyandot warrior, bent upon taking a life. Henry was glad that it was so.
Then he advanced more slowly than ever, choosing a point which he thought was exactly half way between the Wyandots and the other canoes, but he feared the Wyandots most. Twenty yards, and he stopped. One of the Wyandot warriors seemed to have seen something. He was looking fixedly in Henry's direction. Boughs and stumps of every sort often floated down the Ohio.
He had marked the sudden turn of the fugitive and the extraordinary quickness and strength with which he had overthrown Girty, at the same time taking from him his weapon, and his eyes flashed approval. But he was a Wyandot chief, and he could not let such a captive escape. After a few moments of hesitation he joined in the pursuit, and directed it with voice and gesture.
Yet some grew restless and were on the point of giving up the struggle as a failure. On learning this, Pontiac sent out messengers to the Wyandot Indians, ordering them to join him in his war against the British or prepare to be wiped off the face of the earth. By this stroke Pontiac turned threatened loss into gain.
"Does it not appeal to you, Timmendiquas?" said de Peyster. "You have been the most zealous of all the chiefs. You have led great attacks against the settlers, and you have been most eager in battle." Timmendiquas rose very deliberately and speaking in Wyandot, which nearly all present understood, he said: "What the Colonel of the King says is true.
At the first sight of that well known landmark, which stood by the Wyandot village, there mingled with Isaac's despondency and resentment some other feeling that was akin to pleasure; with a quickening of the pulse came a confusion of expectancy and bitter memories as he thought of the dark eyed maiden from whom he had fled a year ago.
Captain Samuel spoke the Wyandot tongue. They set their trail for the great Wyandot Huron town of Upper Sandusky, in north central Ohio. This was the heart of the Indian country. The sound of a white man's voice, the print of a white man's foot, in all that region, would call the rifle, the tomahawk and the stake. It was forbidden ground.
I saw in my travels through these counties a few persons who were ill of ague-fever, as it is here called. The prevalence of this disease is not to be attributed to a general unhealthiness of the climate, but can at all times be referred to localities. I next entered Crawford county, and crossed the Wyandot prairie, about seven miles in length, to Upper Sandusky.
Thirteen Wyandot chiefs were in the allied Indian army that was beaten by Wayne at the Fallen Timbers; the bodies of twelve were found on the field. Henry fully understood the character of the Wyandots, their great enterprise and desperate courage, and he knew that their presence here, west of their own country, portended some great movement.
"After the treaty of peace between the English and Americans, the summer before Wayne's army came out, the English held a council with the Indians, and told them if they would turn out and unite as one man, they might surround the Americans like deer in a ring of fire and destroy them all. The Wyandot spoke further in the council.
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