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THE LURE OF THE MISSISSIPPI
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   :PG.Title: The Lure of the Mississippi
   :PG.Id: 41877
   :PG.Released: 2013-01-19
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Roger Frank
   :DC.Creator: \D. Lange
   :DC.Title: The Lure of the Mississippi
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1917
   :coverpage: images/cover.jpg

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    THE LURE OF THE MISSISSIPPI

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    BY

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    \D. LANGE

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    | :sm:`AUTHOR OF “ON THE TRAIL OF THE SIOUX,” “THE SILVER ISLAND`
    | :sm:`OF THE CHIPPEWA,” “LOST IN THE FUR COUNTRY,”`
    | :sm:`“IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH,” AND “THE`
    | :sm:`LURE OF THE BLACK HILLS”`

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    ILLUSTRATED BY W. L. HOWES

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    | BOSTON
    | LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.

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    Published, October, 1917

    | COPYRIGHT 1917, BY D. Lange
    | THE LURE OF THE MISSISSIPPI

    | Norwood Press
    | BERWICK & SMITH CO.
    | NORWOOD, MASS.
    | U. S. A.

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   :alt: “Come out, you white men, and fight!”

   “Come out, you white men, and fight!”

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    :lg:`FOREWORD`
    
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    The story told here has for its scenic background the Mississippi
    River and its fine northern tributary, the Minnesota, the “Sky-tinted
    Water” of the Sioux Indians.

    The story opens in the spring of 1861. The Civil War has begun.
    Lincoln has called for 75,000 volunteers, while to regiments and
    batteries of the small regular army orders have been issued to hurry
    to Washington as fast as possible.

    Colonel John C. Pemberton embarks his battery on the *Fanny Harris*,
    at Fort Ridgely on the Minnesota River. Hundreds of sullen
    Indians watch the troops leave, and visions of regaining their rich
    hunting grounds in the Minnesota valley arise in the minds of the
    starving savages, who have been brooding for several years over real
    and fancied wrongs.

    Within a year of the departure of the soldiers, a furious Indian war
    sweeps over the young State of Minnesota, while on the Mississippi
    from Cairo to New Orleans Federal and Confederate fleets and armies
    battle for the control of the Great River. On this historical
    background move the characters of the story: Barker, the old trapper;
    Tatanka, the Sioux scout; Tim and Bill Ferguson, two Southern boys;
    and their doubtful friend, Cousin Hicks.

    At Vicksburg, in the summer of 1863, we meet again the former Colonel
    John C. Pemberton, now a general in the Confederate army, stubbornly
    defending the besieged city against the Federal army under General
    Grant.

    | D. Lange.
    | St. Paul, Minnesota,
    | June, 1917.

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CHAPTER I—ON BOARD THE *FANNY HARRIS*
=====================================

There came through the night loud crashing
and rumbling sounds, and a confusion of
men’s voices from the steep road leading
down from Fort Ridgely to the boat-landing
on the Minnesota River.

All afternoon, big William Ferguson and
his ten-year-old brother, Timothy, had
watched the six-mule teams of the United
States Army trot down the steep narrow road
with guns, caissons and army supplies, for
Colonel Pemberton had been ordered to leave
the Sioux frontier in Minnesota and rush his
battery and men to Washington as fast as
possible. Fort Sumter had been fired on.
President Lincoln had called for 75,000 volunteers,
and from north and west, the scattered
detachments and batteries of the regular army
were rushed to Washington. The long-threatened
Civil War had begun.

But in those days, Minnesota was a long
way from the Atlantic coast, for the railroads
had only just touched the Mississippi River.
The soldiers at Fort Ridgely had to travel
five hundred miles by steamboat to La Crosse,
and in order to make all possible haste, they
continued by torchlight the loading of guns,
caissons, ammunition, horses, and stores.

It was the liveliest day little Tim Ferguson
and his big brother, Bill, had ever seen. Bill
had at last gone to sleep, wrapped in his
blanket, with his head resting on a coil of
rope, but the active Tim had never tired of
watching the soldiers loading the big guns,
and the carpenters and engineers repairing
the boat for the fast and dangerous downriver
trip on the flooded, winding Minnesota.

When the crash of timbers and the shouts
of men rang through the night, he shook his
sleeping brother, calling:

“Get up, Bill, get up! A mule team has
rolled down the bluffs; I told you they would.
Come along, Bill!”

Tim had guessed right. Among the trees
lay the wagon and mules, while boxes of shells
and hard-tack were scattered through the
brush. Had it not been for the trees and
brush, men, mules and wagon would have
rolled straight into the swollen river.

“He’s sure a goner,” remarked one of the
men, as he cut the traces of Old Harmony, the
biggest mule of the battery. The neck of the
mule was caught between two trees and his
tongue was hanging out of his mouth full
length. However, no sooner was he released,
than he got up, shook himself, scrambled up
the bluff and did not stop until he reached
the corral, where he uttered one of those bugle-calls
which had earned him the name of
Old Harmony. But soldiers are accustomed
to accidents of this kind, and within half an
hour, Old Harmony’s Six were once more
hitched to the big army-wagon. Both drivers
and mules were a little more careful to keep
the road and, by the light of glaring and smoking
torches and blazing bonfires, the loading
of the boat was rapidly finished.

When reveille sounded at daybreak, the
men marched into the mess-hall at Fort
Ridgely for their last breakfast in Minnesota.

There had been little sleep at the post during
the night. Had a painter like Catlin been
present, he could have left us some fine dramatic
canvases.

Opposite the side of the fort which faced
the open prairie away from the river, some
six or seven hundred Sioux Indians were encamped.
Only the squaws and the little children
rolled up in their blankets in the tepees
that night. Some of the men sat smoking
around their camp-fires, but most of them sat
on the river bank watching the boatmen and
the soldiers working in the red glare of the
torches and bonfires. They had heard that
the white people were having a war amongst
themselves. Now they knew that the story
was true. The soldiers were going away on
the steamer, and with the soldiers were going
most of the big guns, against whose terrible
thunder, balls, and canister no Indian braves
have ever been able to keep up their courage.

“If the soldiers go away and take the big
guns, we can get back the land along our
river. We have been cheated out of it, and
the Whites have never paid us for it,” a middle-aged
warrior remarked.

“We can do more,” added a fierce-looking
young man, known as the Boaster; “we can
drive all the Whites out of Minnesota. But
we shall keep their horses and their squaws
and we shall make big feasts of their oxen.
The Winnebagoes will help us. We shall
make peace with the Chippewas and they will
help us.

“We shall have our villages again at Kaposia
and at Wabasha, on the Great River,
and the Whites will have to stay on the other
side of the Great River. This is our country
and Manitou will send back the buffalo and
the elk, and the deer will become numerous
again. We shall have plenty of meat and
skins as in the days of our fathers before the
Whites had poisoned the land with their
plows, for the black soil which the plows turn
up is bad medicine for buffalo and elk and
deer.”

When the shadows of the trees began to be
reflected on the grayish current, the last
morning blast of the *Fanny Harris* echoed
over the flooded valley. The three howitzers
left at the fort fired a salute, the few remaining
men cheered their departing comrades
and the soldiers on board replied with a ringing
hurrah for Abe Lincoln and Fort Ridgely.
Then the pilot rang a bell, the hawsers were
drawn on board, the big stern-wheel churned
the water to a white foam, the heavily-laden
steamer backed into the current, turned
around slowly, and headed down stream for
Fort Snelling near St. Paul.

On board, besides the soldiers, were Bill
and Tim Ferguson, Sam Baker, a trapper,
and Black Buffalo, an Indian scout.

The Ferguson brothers were Southern boys
from Vicksburg, who had come North with a
man they called Cousin Hicks, and with whom
they lived in a squatter’s cabin a few miles
below Fort Ridgely. Hicks, about whose
business in the Indian country there were
many conflicting rumors afloat, had been
away for a week visiting the Indians on the
upper Minnesota, and in his absence Baker
and Black Buffalo had invited the Ferguson
boys to go with them to Fort Snelling and St.
Paul.

The trip of the *Fanny Harris* from Fort
Ridgely to La Crosse was never forgotten by
any one on board. The *Fanny Harris* being
a stern-wheeler, was naturally difficult to
steer in a strong current. The Minnesota is
one of the most twisted and crooked rivers in
the West. In April, 1861, the water was so
high that the placid, winding river had grown
a mile wide, flooding its valley from bluff to
bluff, and in many places the water flowed
with a rushing current, crossing the river bed
at all angles and making innumerable short
cuts across fields, marshes, and woods.

“Back her up,” the pilot’s bell would sound
as he tried to round one of the countless
points or bends. But it was impossible to
back the heavy boat against the current. The
engineers could not even stop her. The best
they could do was to check her speed and let
her drift flanking around the wooded points,
where trees and boughs raked her whole
length, tearing down stanchions, guards, and
gingerbread work with a deafening crash.

At other times, she would plunge straight
into the timber, bending the smaller willows
and other brush like so many reeds and tearing
good-sized trees by the roots out of the
soft mud, but before she could be again gotten
into clear water, a big cottonwood bough had
torn away another joint of her chimneys and
smashed another part of her pilot-house.

But all this time, Colonel Lantry, who had
been in supreme command ever since the boat
had left Fort Snelling, stood on deck with the
captain, or at the wheel with the pilots.

“Keep her going, keep her going! Keep
your wheel turning!” were the only orders
he gave to captain or pilot as he dodged trees
and falling timbers.

“We must get to Washington, before the
Rebels get there!”

“We’ll never get there,” vowed an old artilleryman
who had been through the Mexican
war with this same battery. “This is worse
than a battle. We’ll never get there. We’ll
be swimming around with the muskrats and
roosting on the drift-wood and haystacks
with them.

“I’d rather be in a battle where I can use
my piece, than sail through the timber in this
blooming tub on this beastly twisted river!”

Toward evening the steamer again crashed
into the timber and a willow tree, springing
back as the side of the boat had passed it,
tore away several planks or buckets from the
wheel.

“Boys, it’s for the rat-houses now,” called
out the old gunner as the boat stopped with a
crash.

But Colonel Lantry coolly repeated his
usual: “Keep her going, Captain; keep her
going! The Government will build you a
new boat!” However, with a broken wheel
she could not keep going.

“Take the anchor over to the other shore,”
Captain Faucette ordered three men. “Then
pass the line around the capstan and we’ll
pull her back into open water. Well tie up
here for the night and repair the wheel.”

Repairing the wheel was hard and dangerous
work. With one hand the men worked at
screwing down and unscrewing bolts and
nuts, with the other hand they hung on to
dripping, slippery planks and beams.

“Careful men, careful,” Captain Faucette
cautioned them. “Any man that goes overboard
into this icy current is lost.”

By the light of lanterns and torches, the
men worked with a will. One bucket was just
being lifted into place, when there was a
scramble and a plunge—“Man overboard!”
The cry arose and at once there was a confusion
of hurrying feet and calling voices.

Tim, the Indian, and the trapper were just
eating supper, while Bill had been watching
and helping the men. Bill ripped off his coat.
“Hold up the torches!” he called, and sprang
after the man, who was just disappearing behind
the wheel. The icy flood almost choked
him, but he struck out after the man. By
the glare of the torches he caught a glimpse
of him bobbing up and being carried toward a
mass of driftwood. He seized the back of
the man’s shirt, pulled him to the driftwood,
and tried to climb up, but it would not support
his weight. He hooked his left arm around
an overhanging willow, and with his right
hand he raised the man’s head above the current.

“Bring a boat, quick!” he called. “I can’t
hold on long. I’m all numb!”

In a few minutes, Mattson, the unfortunate
carpenter, and Bill were safe on board
and Colonel Lantry took charge of them.

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   :alt: With his right hand he raised the man’s head above the current.

   With his right hand he raised the man’s head above the current.

“Here,” he said to two soldiers, “turn
this man over on his face and bring him to.
You know how.”

Then to the men: “On with your work,
men. We must reach Fort Snelling to-morrow
night.”

Bill had slipped away to his corner on the
coil of ropes. His teeth chattered and his
hands felt so numb that he could hardly
wriggle out of his wet and sticky garments.

When he was once more in dry clothes, he
hurried to the mess-room and asked the cook
for the hottest tea he had.

The cook did not have to be told.

“I’d give you something better,” he said,
“if I had it, but the hot milk is all gone. The
captain is in a deuce of a hurry, so we
went right by Mankato and St. Peter without
stopping.”

After two cups of hot tea, sweetened with
plenty of brown sugar, Bill’s teeth stopped
rattling, but set themselves with a will into
the meal of ham, potatoes, and bread placed
before the hungry boy, who had not yet had
his supper.

While Bill was eating, Colonel Lantry came
around.

“Where did you learn it, boy?” he asked.
“It was a neat piece of work.”

“Oh, I learned it at Vicksburg,” Bill replied.
“We boys used to swim across the
river, but there the water is warm.”

“At Vicksburg,” the officer repeated.
“You are not going to Vicksburg! You are
too young to enlist. You had better stay in
Minnesota. There’s likely to be hell at
Vicksburg before this war is over.”




CHAPTER II—IN GREAT ANXIETY
===========================

The words of the Colonel had aroused a
train of thoughts in the boy.

Was there really going to be war at Vicksburg?
The boys had heard talk of war, but
not until they had watched the loading of the
guns and the embarking of the soldiers and
had heard the pressing orders of the keen,
straight army officer to “keep her going,” to
“push her through,” had this war talk meant
anything to them.

Tim was almost too young to understand
such things, but to Bill the war had suddenly
become a fearful reality. Fortunately, these
big guns were not going to Vicksburg; they
were going to Washington, which was a long,
long way from Vicksburg.

From the talk of the men and from newspapers
which had occasionally fallen into
Bill’s hands, the boys had learned that during
the previous winter their own State,
Mississippi, had left the Union, and that Alabama,
Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana, had
likewise followed the lead of South Carolina,
which had seceded a few days before
Christmas.

By this time almost everybody on the boat
was asleep, except the carpenters and engineers,
who were still working to put the
steamer into first-class running shape.

But Bill’s mind turned from the great
problem and puzzle of national events to more
personal problems, which in a vague manner
he had often tried to solve.

Why had his mother never told him anything
about his grandfather in Tennessee,
except that he was a very good man, who
lived on a large plantation, and had many
slaves? Why had he and Tim never visited
their grandfather? Many boys of Vicksburg
spent months at a time on the plantations of
their grandfathers.

What kind of a man was their cousin,
Hicks, really?

Both Bill and Tim liked Trapper Barker
very much and even Black Buffalo, although
he was an Indian, and spoke only a broken
English, they liked, but they had begun to
feel that there was something mysterious
about Cousin Hicks. He didn’t try to make
a farm. He had bought no farm horses nor
oxen like the other settlers. He had only
planted a little corn and a few potatoes and
beans and he let the boys do the work in the
small field, while with a light team and wagon
he visited around amongst the Indians and
Whites. Why didn’t he stay at home and
work like the German and Irish and Yankee
settlers?

Had he only gone to Minnesota so that Tim
might grow big and strong in the northern
climate? Tim had often been sick at Vicksburg,
but now he was as strong and active as
any small boy of his age; however, Cousin
Hicks seemed to take little interest in Tim’s
health.

At last the troubled boy fell asleep and all
his puzzles were forgotten until the clear call
of the bugler: “We can’t get them up—we
can’t get them up in the morning!” echoed
over the flooded valley. It seemed to Bill
that he had slept only a five minutes, although
it was now full daylight. The ruddy sheen
of the rising sun was reflected in a broad
streak of red from the swirling, rushing and
gliding waters, while masses of black smoke
were curling from the chimneys of the boat.

The *Fanny Harris* had filled up with coal
before she left St. Paul, because the wood-yards
were flooded and much of the cord-wood
piled up for sale at the different landing
places had drifted down stream.

The second day’s travel was much like the
first, but contrary to the expectation of the
artillerymen, the boat did reach the Fort
Snelling landing in the evening, having made
more than three hundred miles in two days.

Her appearance, however, was more like
that of a wreck than of a safe ship. Had
there been any turn-bridges in those days,
they would not have had to open for her.
Only six feet were left of her tallest smokestack,
while the other projected only a yard
above the deck.

But Colonel Lantry would not stop for repairs.

“How are her hull and engine?” he asked.

“All sound, sir,” replied Captain Faucette.

“Then we shall cast off at daylight,” he
ordered. “You can patch her up at La
Crosse.”

At La Crosse the soldiers, guns, and horses
were transferred to railroad cars. Col. John E. Pemberton
accompanied his men to Washington,
where he resigned and entered the
service of the Confederate States.

The four civilian travelers left the
*Fanny Harris* at Fort Snelling, and stayed a few
days at Snelling and St. Paul, till Barker and
Black Buffalo had finished their trading.

At these two places, the excitement was as
great as it had been at Fort Ridgely. Fort
Snelling had been made the recruiting station
for the State, and from all over the
State men were responding to the call of
President Lincoln. Hundreds of men were
encamped in tents and rapidly constructed
shacks, because the old stone barracks could
not hold them all. Captain Acker’s company
was already complete and before the end of
the month the First Minnesota Regiment was
mustered in.

At the frontier town of St. Paul, the excitement
was as great as at Fort Snelling.
Everybody talked war, while at the river
front two dozen boats were hastily loading
and unloading. Mixed with the excited white
people were a number of silent, stolid-looking
Indians, both Chippewa and Sioux. They
were found in the stores, on the streets and at
the boat landing.

The town seemed full of soldiers from all
parts of the State. Some of the men of the
*Fanny Harris* had deserted the boat at Fort
Snelling, because they were afraid if they
waited they might not be able to get in on the
75,000 President Lincoln had called for.

On the first up-river boat, the two lads and
their friends started back for Fort Ridgely.
They were all in a sad mood. Bill could not
help thinking of the words of the officer, in
regard to Vicksburg, while Barker and Black
Buffalo were turning over in their minds the
looks and the talk of the Sioux, who in the
red glare of torches and bonfires, had been
watching the loading of cannons and other
preparations for the departure of the soldiers.

Black Buffalo especially seemed in a sullen
mood.

“Who is the white boys’ cousin?” he asked
Barker, when the two were sitting alone on
the rear deck after dinner, while the boys
were watching immense flocks of geese,
ducks, and cormorants that were now going
north over the flooded valley.

“He pretends to be their friend,” replied
the trapper, “but I am, like yourself, much
puzzled by his actions and behavior. He does
nothing for the boys. He talks of finding a
good squatter’s homestead for them, but
even Bill is much too young to hold a piece of
land till it is surveyed and opened for settlement.”

“He is not their friend,” Black Buffalo uttered
gruffly. “I see him often talking with
bad Indians and bad white men. I do not like
him; he is a bad man. He sells rum to the
Indians, when he thinks no eyes see him, and
he talks against the good work of the missionaries.

“We should keep our eyes on him. He
means to do some harm to the boys.”

“What harm could he do to them?” Barker
asked, trying to conceal his own fears
and the anxiety he had often felt about the
relation of the two boys to their supposed
cousin.

“We must watch him,” he said to Black
Buffalo; “there is something strange about
him. He can talk well, but his eye is unsteady.”

“Yes,” replied the Indian, “his words do
not tell you what is in his heart.”

In the middle of the afternoon, the engine
broke down and the boat tied up near the
present town of Belle Plaine, about fifty miles
above St. Paul.

While the engineers were repairing the machinery,
the two boys and their friends went
out in two small boats to hunt ducks and geese
on the flooded marshes.

They landed on a small island of high land
and the men chose a convenient blind behind
some bushes. The boys had no guns and had
just gone along to watch the fun and to bring
in the ducks which the hunters would drop,
but they found some unexpected and exciting
hunting for themselves.

“See the rabbit, see the rabbit!” Tim cried.
“He is sitting on a stump with water all
around him.”

The boys were surprised to find that the
rabbit did not try to get away as they approached.

“He’s dead,” said Tim.

“No, he isn’t,” laughed Bill, “I see his
nose move; he is breathing.”

Some brush had drifted against the stump
and the rabbit had eaten it as far as he had
been able to reach.

When the boys lifted the rabbit into the
boat, they had another surprise, for nestled
under his fur they discovered a black meadow
mouse that had also sought refuge on the
stump when the water had risen.

“Take him off,” Tim begged, “he’ll freeze
to death on the stump,” and Bill took him off
and placed him under the rabbit, who was
quietly squatting under the seat as if he belonged
there.

When the boys returned to the brush-and-grass-covered
island, they discovered four
more rabbits, who, however, were more lively
than the one on the stump. They ran about
in a most puzzling zigzag fashion and one
even tried to swim across a channel to another
piece of dry land. But the boys caught them
all and put them in the boat, from which they
did not try to escape.

While they were chasing the rabbits the
boys made another discovery. The island
was alive with black meadow-mice; there were
hundreds of them. Every tuft of dead grass,
every bush, every pile of dead leaves was
crowded with them.

“Oh, Tim,” teased Bill, “let’s row back to
the boat and get some pie for all your pets.”

But Tim had caught the twinkle in his
brother’s eye. “Ah, you can’t fool me,” he
came back. “Don’t you think I know that
these wild mice have plenty of grass and
brush to eat till the water goes down?”

It did not take the boys long to decide what
to do with the rabbits.

“If we could only keep them,” was Tim’s
wish. “We would have as much fun with
them as we had with our rabbits at Vicksburg.”

“No use; we can’t keep them,” Bill argued.
“We would have to stay at home every day or
let them out, and if we let them out, they will
eat up our garden and Cousin Hicks will kill
them. There are too many rabbits at our
shack now.”

So the boys rowed their catch of game
ashore. When the boat touched land, the
stupid rabbits became lively at once. They
hopped out of the boat and, true to their instinct
for hiding, disappeared at once; some
into a hole and others under a pile of brush.

On their way back the boys, quite excited
about this new way of hunting, peeped into a
hollow log.

“There’s an animal in it!” exclaimed Tim.

“Look out!” Bill warned him, “maybe it’s
a skunk. If you catch a skunk, you can’t go
back on the boat.”

“It’s no skunk,” replied Tim. “It’s a
gray animal. It’s a coon. Let’s catch him.”

Bill poked the animal with a stick and before
he had time to warn his younger brother
to look out for the coon’s teeth and claws,
Tim had grabbed the creature by the neck,
dropped him in the boat and thrown his coat
over the snarling animal.

“Look at him,” Tim cried. “Doesn’t he
look funny, peeping out from under my coat?”

“My, but he is thin! I bet he is cold and
starved. Let us take him to the hunters and
give him something to eat.”

“Mr. Barker, what does a coon eat!”
Tim shouted as they approached the men.
“We’ve caught one.”

“Anything, except wood,” the trapper told
them. “Give him a piece of duck-meat. We
have ducks enough for the whole boat.”

When Tim offered the raccoon a piece of
duck-meat, he took it, soused it in the water
in the boat, devoured it greedily and began
whining for more. He ate several other
pieces in the same way.

“Why does he wash his meat?” the boys
asked.

“It’s just his queer way,” the trapper told
them. “You give him a piece of fresh pie,
and he’ll souse it in a mudhole before he
eats it.

“A coon’s a queer fellow. My German
neighbors call him ‘washbear,’ on account of
his peculiar habits. I had a tame coon once,
but he died from eating a pan of boot-grease.”

“Why didn’t you watch him?” asked Tim.

“You can’t watch a coon,” the trapper
laughed, “he’s always in some mischief. I’d
rather watch ten boys than one coon.”

On the four days it took the boat to reach
Fort Ridgely the boys had plenty of time to
ask the trapper about the war.

“It won’t last long, that’s what I think,”
the trapper told them. “When the Confederates
see that Abe Lincoln has 75,000 soldiers,
they will quit.”

“Will they fight at Vicksburg?” asked Bill.

“No, you needn’t worry, boys. They’ll
soon fix it all up at Washington and the soldiers
will come home.”

“The officer said it would be hell at Vicksburg,”
Tim remarked, “and it would be a big,
long war.”

“That’s what some of the army officers
think,” the trapper admitted, “but most other
people don’t think so.”

Black Buffalo was as much puzzled by the
war between the white people as the boys.

“Do the people from this country want to
go south,” he asked, “just as the Chippewas
from the North want to come into our Sioux
country?”

“No, that isn’t it,” the trapper explained.
“The white people of the South want to keep
their black slaves, and they wish to have a
country and a president of their own. They
don’t like Abe Lincoln.”

When on the evening of the fourth day, the
steamer whistled for the Fort Ridgely landing,
the boys were glad to get off the boat,
but felt very uneasy about the reception
Cousin Hicks would give them.

“I wish we could go back to Vicksburg,”
Tim whispered to his brother. “I am homesick.”

“Come on, boys,” Mr. Barker called in his
pleasant, manly voice. “I’ll stay at your
shack to-night, and if your cousin is at home,
I’ll have a visit and a talk with him. Don’t
forget your coon, Tim; I guess you will have
to carry him if you want to take him home.”

CHAPTER III—PLAIN TALK AND UGLY RUMORS
======================================

Cousin Hicks was at home and greeted the
boys with apparent heartiness. To Barker
he was friendly, but did not invite him to
stay over night.

“You need not go to any trouble,” the
trapper told him. “We have had our supper
on the boat, and I will just spread my blanket
on the floor for the night. You know a seasoned
trapper can sleep anywhere.”

“Yes, do make yourself at home,” Hicks
said now. “I am glad you took the boys with
you to St. Paul. It is a bit lonesome for them
here, and I have to be away a good deal.”

Next morning Hicks walked along the
prairie road with Barker, and the trapper
knew that Hicks had something to say to him.

When they were no longer within sight of
the shack, Hicks began:

“It would suit me just as well, Barker, if
you wouldn’t take those lads away from my
place. I’m their guardian and I reckon I
can look after them.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that, Mr. Hicks.
I always thought the boys ought to have a
guardian. But I want to tell you that, in my
opinion, you have done blessed little guarding.”

“Just the same,” Hicks replied, his Southern
accent becoming more pronounced, “it
would suit me just as well if you and yours
wouldn’t meddle in my business.”

“Now look here, Hicks,” the trapper
turned on him with his gray eyes flashing,
“this isn’t a matter of business at all. You
claim to be the friend or guardian of these
two boys, and you not only neglect them, but
you expose them to great danger.”

“Where’s the danger, and what...?”
Hicks started, his anger plainly rising.

“Hicks,” the trapper cut him short, “don’t
pretend to me that you don’t know. You
know as well as I do that a storm is brewing
here and that the Indians may break into murder
and war almost any day. It would not
have surprised me if they had broken out before
the *Fanny Harris* had reached La
Crosse.”

“All the same,” retorted Hicks, trying to
straighten his lank and stooped body, “you
and yours will let those boys alone in the future.”

Barker felt this was a threat. “Good,” he
replied. “If that’s your trump card, I’ll
play mine. Hicks, if any harm comes to those
lads, I’ll hunt you down and make you pay for
it. Remember that! Your duty is to take
those lads home to Vicksburg and you can
come back with a load of rum, if you want to.
We’re through. Good morning.”

The two men stood facing each other a
moment. A whirling gust blew off the old
gray hat of Hicks, and he hurriedly caught
it and put it on again. Then, without a word,
he turned and with a slouching gait started
to go back.

Something about Hicks had startled Barker.
For a moment he stood thinking. Had
he not seen this man years ago? Then he
leaned against an old gnarly bur-oak. Hicks
turned as if he would come back, but when
he saw the trapper watching him, he changed
his mind.

“No, Hicks,” the trapper thought, “your
game won’t work on me. You can’t plug me
in the back and bury me in the brush in the
ravine.”

But where had he met this man before? He
lit his pipe and thought. Now it flashed upon
him. Ten years ago, when he had been trapping
and hunting wild turkeys in the valley
of the Wabash, in Indiana, he had met a man
he had never forgotten. The man was under
arrest for murder and the sheriff stopped
over night with him in Barker’s cabin. The
next day he broke away and had never been
heard from. He had black hair then, dark
eyes, and a small red scar stood out sharply
on his white forehead.

“That man was Hicks!” the trapper exclaimed.
“I never forgot that scar.”

“Why has he brought those boys into the
Indian Country?” Barker asked himself.
“How could any parents trust their boys to a
man of his kind?” But Hicks could be very
pleasant, and he was a good talker. He had
made many friends among both Whites and
Indians. He seemed to have some money
and was a liberal spender. Nevertheless,
after turning over in his mind all he knew
about Hicks, Barker could not make up his
mind why Hicks and the boys were here and
why Hicks so absolutely neglected the boys
he had evidently promised to look after.

A week later Barker met the boys at a
slough, where both he and the lads sometimes
went for a mess of wild ducks and the trapper
decided to see what he could find out
about Cousin Hicks. The boys being asked,
told freely what they knew.

Cousin Hicks was some distant relative of
their mother. He had lived at Vicksburg
about a year and had often visited at their
home and had sat many hours chatting with
their father in his little store. The boys had
gone north with him, so they could squat on
some good land, and because Tim was often
sick at Vicksburg. As soon as their parents
could sell their store, they would also come
north, because they had heard and read about
the boom in Minnesota lands and what big
crops of wheat it would raise. The boys liked
it in Minnesota, only Tim got homesick at
times. Cousin Hicks was not mean to them,
only he didn’t work and didn’t stay at home,
but he never worked much in Vicksburg,
either.

There had been some trouble and a lawsuit
between their two grandfathers in Tennessee
and the boys had never been to see them.

That was all the boys knew. It did not
help Barker much, but he felt more sure than
ever that Hicks was playing some crooked
game and he decided to watch things, no matter
what might be the outcome.

When fall came, the boys had eaten all the
corn in their garden and in order to have
something to live on during the winter, they
went to a large slough to gather wild rice in
the way they had learned of the Indians.

As the winter passed, bad news came for
the lads from the South. Their father wrote
that the war was getting worse and that on
account of it he could not hope to sell his
store, but that the boys might as well stay in
Minnesota.

The war had indeed, by this time, assumed
immense proportions, both in the East and in
the West near the Mississippi River. In the
West, Grant had captured the important
points of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson and
had fought the terrible two days’ battle of
Shiloh. After this battle, most Northerners
became convinced that the Confederacy
would not suddenly collapse after one or two
battles.

By the first of July, 1862, the land forces,
under Grant and two fleets of gunboats, the
lower under Admiral Farragut, and the upper
under Commodore Henry Davis, had
obtained control of the Mississippi River, except
for a stretch of river between Vicksburg
and Port Hudson, a distance of two hundred
miles.

By far the most important and strongest
point on the river still held by the Confederates
was Vicksburg. It is located on the
east side of the river on high land with
wooded hills about two hundred feet high directly
to the east of the city. The cities of
St. Louis, Cairo, Memphis, and New Orleans
were all held by the Union forces. It was of
great importance for the Union forces to capture
Vicksburg, because the capture of this
city would give them complete control of the
great river and would cut the Confederacy in
two, cutting off their supply of grain and
meat from Arkansas and Texas. If Vicksburg
could be taken, the Confederacy would
be blockaded on the Atlantic, the Gulf of
Mexico, and on the Mississippi.

The task of taking this important city fell
to General Grant, and it proved a most difficult
undertaking. The heavy batteries of
guns placed in all favorable positions could
not be silenced by the Federal gunboats. The
city was also defended by a garrison of several
thousand men, and on July 15th, the
iron-clad Confederate ram, *Arkansas*, coming
out of the Yazoo River, just above Vicksburg,
ran through and practically defeated the
whole fleet of Commodore Davis. For several
days this one Confederate gunboat held
both Admiral Farragut’s fleet and the fleet of
Commodore Davis at bay until both withdrew,
one up, the other down, the river.

The fight of the *Arkansas* under its fearless
Captain I. N. Brown, is one of the most
heroic chapters in naval warfare.

Why the Federals allowed this formidable
ram six weeks to be completed and armed at
Yazoo City, within fifty miles of their own
upper fleet, has thus far remained a mystery.
On the fifteenth of August, Bill and Tim
Ferguson, after an interval of several months,
received the following letter from their
father at Vicksburg:

    “:small-caps:`My dear boys:`

    “You have probably read or heard about
    the fighting that has been going on here.
    Your mother and I live in a cave now and we
    are getting used to the screeching and bursting
    of shells, which the Federal gunboats
    throw into the city. But now our one little
    iron-clad *Arkansas* has driven off both the upper
    and lower Federal fleet. Think of that!
    and last night your mother and I slept at
    home once more.

    “You boys would like to see the *Arkansas*.
    She looks like a scow with an iron house boat
    built on it. The house-boat part has slanting
    sides in every direction. Captain Brown,
    her commander, built her at Yazoo City;
    Brown had thousands of railroad rails bent
    into shape and with these he completely covered
    her sides and where he could not use
    rails, he used boiler-plate. If we only had
    a few more Browns and *Arkansases*, we
    would soon chase the whole Yankee fleet into
    the canebrakes.

    “Most people here are still very hopeful
    that no serious attempt will be made by Grant
    and the Northern fleet to take Vicksburg, but
    I fear they are mistaken.

    “Our fleet was so hopelessly smashed at
    Memphis that we have only a few vessels left,
    while the Federals seem to have no end of
    gunboats and transports. It may be that the
    Gibraltar of the Great River can not be
    taken, but I feel sure that Grant and Sherman
    and Admiral Porter now commanding the
    Federal fleet above Vicksburg, are going to
    try it. When that time comes, Vicksburg
    will be a bad place to live in.

    “Mother would like to send you some
    turkeys and chickens, but as that is impossible,
    she hopes that you may really enjoy the
    wild ducks and geese that you have written
    about.

    “We are very glad that you are far away
    from this fearful and sad war and we wish
    you to stay north till peace has come again.”

The writer did not know that at the very
time he wrote these words, two thousand
Sioux were encamped on the Minnesota
River, within a few hours’ ride of his boys,
and were ready at almost any moment to rush
into a war much more cruel than that being
waged on the Great River, where only armed
men fought against armed men.

CHAPTER IV—THE BREAKING OF THE STORM
====================================

Men who have lived outdoors and know the
moods of nature fear the breaking of a storm
that has been long brewing.

The Indian War which broke over the summery
plains and valleys of Minnesota on Monday
morning, August 18, 1862, swept over a
large section of the State with the rush and
fury of a long-brewing storm.

For several years the Sioux had been gathering
a store of hatred and desire of revenge
for real and fancied wrongs. On Sunday, the
17th of August, a few young Indians in an
accidental quarrel with some farmers in
Meeker county killed some cattle and murdered
several whites. Under ordinary conditions
this would have ended in the surrender
and punishment of the criminals, but now
it was the signal for three thousand Sioux
warriors to rush into a carnival of murder
and rapine, which swept over the frontier settlement
as a tornado rushes through the
forest.

At daybreak on the 18th, Black Buffalo
knocked on the cabin of Trapper Barker.

“Get up, my friend,” he called, “the war
has begun. You must flee, or you will be murdered.

“I have just learned that Chief Little Crow
has told the warriors to kill all white people
they can find, and the warriors have started
in large and small parties in all directions.
Some people at the Lower Agency, near the
big Indian camp, have already been killed.
Make haste, Mehunka, or you will be killed.”

“Do all the Indians want the war?” asked
Barker, as he hurriedly dressed himself for
flight.

“No,” said Black Buffalo. “Many of us,
Little Paul, John Other Day, myself, and
many others think this war is foolish and will
only bring tears and mourning to our women
and children, and ruin to our whole people,
but we are powerless to stop the madness of
Little Crow and the young men.”

“I have an extra saddle-horse,” said
Barker as he was ready to mount. “We must
warn Bill and Tim.”

“You are right, Mehunka; I have brought
an extra horse. The white boys should come
with us, if they are willing.”

“They must come with us!” exclaimed
Barker, “whether they will or not.”

“Perhaps the lanky white man will not let
them,” Black Buffalo suggested. “He
wishes to keep the boys here. I do not know
why. He would not mourn if harm came to
them. He does not love them.”

“Lanky Hicks be cursed!” Barker exclaimed
in Sioux. “I shall point my rifle at
his head, if he refuses to let them go; he
should have taken them home long ago.”

Bill and Tim were just eating their simple
breakfast of wild rice and maple syrup when
they saw two horsemen coming at a gallop.

“Look, Bill,” cried Tim, “here comes Mr.
Barker and Tatanka! Hurrah! We’ll go
and hunt ducks on the slough to-day. It’s so
long since they have visited us.”

But when Barker hastily jumped off his
horse and entered the cabin before the lads
could cry, “Come in,” to his knock, they knew
that their two friends had not come to invite
them to go hunting.

“Good morning, my lads,” Barker greeted
them. “Where is Cousin Hicks?”

“We don’t know,” answered Bill. “We
haven’t seen him since Friday.”

“Put on your hoots, roll up your coats and
blankets, and come along,” the trapper continued.
“The Sioux have gone to war and
are killing the people all around. You must
not lose a minute; a bunch of them may show
up almost any moment.”

When all were ready to mount, Tim asked,
“What about Cousin Hicks? Will the warriors
get him?”

Bill thought he saw a flash of anger in the
dark eyes of Tatanka at the mention of
Cousin Hicks, and the Indian said something
in Sioux which the boys did not understand.

But the trapper laughed and remarked:

“I thought you were a Christian, Tatanka?”

“I am,” replied Black Buffalo in Sioux,
“but not when I see that man.”

If the boys had not implicitly believed
Barker and Tatanka, they would have thought
their story some crude joke, for as they
started their horses at an easy gait, they saw
no sign of war or Sioux warriors. The dew
still lay heavy on the tall grass in the swales,
while many kinds of butterflies, white, yellow,
blue, and tawny red, were sipping their morning
draught of honey from goldenrods and
wild sunflowers, and from the fragrant milkweeds
and purple lead-plants.

Now and then, a meadow-lark warbled its
cheerful song from a knoll or rock, while the
little striped gophers chased each other or sat
like horse-pins in front of their holes and
scolded vociferously at the passing riders.

“What are they saying?” Tim asked of the
trapper.

“They are talking bad talk at Meetcha, your
raccoon,” Barker replied, with a smile.
“You let Meetcha catch one. Manetcha is a
brave animal near his hole.”

Tim let Meetcha try it, but every time he
came within a few feet of a chattering, scolding
gopher, the little striped creature turned
a somersault and shot into his hole.

“Take him up, Tim,” said the trapper after a
few minutes; “we have not much time
to hunt gophers.”

They now started their horses at a run for
the two nearest settlers and gave them the
warning.

“Get away as quick as you can. Don’t
follow the road to Fort Ridgely or New Ulm,
or you’ll be ambushed there in the timber.
Keep a sharp lookout and hide in the grass
or brush or corn, if you see Indians. Don’t
trust any; they are all on the warpath now.”

Without waiting for the settlers to move,
the four horsemen started at a brisk gallop
for a third settler at the head of a wooded
ravine.

“Keep away from the timber,” Tatanka
cautioned them. “Indians like to hide when
they fight.”

The riders approached the cabin carefully
over the prairie. The door was standing
open.

The boys still felt as if the whole story was
a bad hoax, but now the two men stopped their
horses, examined the caps on their guns, and
then Tatanka carefully crept up to the shanty
through some scrub-oaks.

“What is Tatanka afraid of?” asked Tim.

“He is afraid,” Barker explained, “that
some Indians have seen us and are hiding in
the house or behind it.”

Now Tatanka appeared in front of the
shanty and motioned the others to come. In
the house everything was confusion. The
table was turned over and the broken dishes
were scattered and tumbled about on the floor.
Every pane in the one small window was
smashed and in the hazel-brush just behind
the little home, Jim Humphrey, the owner,
lay dead, his hands still gripping the handle
of an ax.

“The brutes have taken Jim’s wife and
daughter with them,” murmured Barker.
“Boys,” he continued, “you stand watch
while Tatanka and I cover poor Humphrey’s
body with green twigs and earth. We dare
not wait to do more.”

What had thus far seemed like a horrible
dream to the boys, had now become a ghastly
reality. They were face to face with the horrors
of savage warfare.

The next cabin, two miles northeast, was on
fire and six men, three on horseback and three
on a farm-wagon, were coming toward them.
The four fugitives halted. “What are
they!” Barker asked.

“They are Indians,” Tatanka decided at
once. “We must make a run for the clump
of poplars north of us.”

In the center of the round clump of poplars
and thick brush, they tied their horses.

“They can’t see them here,” Tatanka
stated. “Now, we must lie down near the
edge of the brush, but so that they cannot see
us, and don’t waste your powder. We may
have to stay here for a long time.”

The Indians had all turned off the road and
were approaching the thicket.

“Give them a shot, Bill,” said Barker.
“They are only a quarter of a mile away.
It’s going to be a fight for our lives.”

Two of the Indians returned Bill’s fire, but
their balls or shot fell short.

“I think they have nothing but old trader
guns. In that case, we may be able to beat
them off,” remarked Barker.

The Indians took the team out of range.
Then, three of them on horseback, and three
on foot, they surrounded the grove.

One of the Indians on foot waved his
blanket and shouted:

“Come out, you white men, and fight. You
are squaws, you are rabbits.”

The horsemen slowly rode around the
copse, while it became evident that the other
three were trying to crawl up through the
grass to a small clump of hazel-brush.

“Keep cool, boys,” the trapper admonished.
“Don’t waste powder; hit your mark.
Anybody can hit the prairie.”

“What do they want of us?” asked Tim,
who had tied his coon to a tree. “We have
nothing.”

“My lad,” laughed the trapper, “we have
good horses and guns and four extra-fine
scalps, and they want to play great heroes in
camp to-night.”

Two hours passed without a shot being
fired. The sun had grown hot, the heat-cats
began to run up the south-facing hill, and Bill
and Tim found this tedious waiting and
watching the hardest kind of work they had
ever done. Barker and Tatanka did not seem
to mind it. They kept their eyes on the
enemy but chatted and joked quietly in the
most unconcerned manner, as if being besieged
by Indians were a most ordinary thing
to them.

“I don’t think they are a bit afraid,” said
Bill.

“I’m not afraid,” Tim answered, “as long
as the Indians don’t come into our bush. But
I’m hungry and awfully thirsty.”

“I think I can find water,” said Bill. “I’m
awfully thirsty, too. You watch my Indian a
little while.”

In half an hour Bill came back. “Tim,” he
reported, with joy, “go to the big poplar near
the horses. I’ve dug a well there with my
hands and knife. The water isn’t very good,
but it will give you a drink.”

Tim went and told the men about Bill’s
well, and both took turns to get a drink.

“Oh!” remarked Tatanka, with a grin,
“Bill has found good water. He is a good
Indian soldier.”

A little later, Tatanka crept rapidly forward
to an outlying willow-bush where he
quietly rose on his knees and fired. The
bragging Indian jumped out of the grass and
tried to run away, but he staggered and fell.

Then the Indian on the white horse came on
a gallop to carry off the wounded man, but
Tatanka fired again and the white horse fell
dead, but the dismounted rider helped the
wounded man to get out of range, before Tatanka
could load and fire again.

While this had been going on, the two other
mounted Indians had come racing along as if
they would run straight into the copse, and
both Tim and Barker fired at them. The trapper’s
mark reared and plunged for the open
prairie, and the other rider also threw his
pony around, for Tim’s bullet had gone singing
close over his head. When they had run
some hundred yards, both Indians turned and
fired, but as the defenders had kept well under
cover, the balls flew wild among the thick
poplars.

Indian warriors have seldom held out long
against men who made a brave stand. When
the Sioux saw that they were getting the
worse of the fight, they all withdrew to the
wagon and started westward.

Tatanka now ran out into the open, waved
his blanket and shouted, “You are squaws.
You are gophers. Run to your holes.”

Then turning to Barker, he said, “Come,
brother, we scare them.”

Before the boys knew what Tatanka meant,
the two men were racing after the Indians as
fast as the horses could go.

When the Indians saw them coming, they
whipped their horses into a gallop and disappeared
over a rise on the prairie.

Barker and Tatanka did not follow their
routed enemies over the rise, but returned at
once to their poplar fort.

After the four defenders had taken a drink
out of Bill’s well, they all sat down in the
shade on the edge of the thicket where the
poplar leaves rustled pleasantly in the summer
breeze.

“Now, friends,” the trapper said, “it is
time for a little lunch. Here is a piece of
cornbread left over from my breakfast. It
isn’t much, but we all get a bite. In the
meantime, keep your eyes on the prairie and
look out for Indian heads.”

“I think we should stay here until dark,”
Tatanka suggested, “and then start for Shakopee
or Fort Snelling. Indians do not fight
during the night. The sky is going to be clear
and we can travel by the stars. It is very
dangerous to travel in daylight.”

“You are right, my friend,” the trapper replied,
“but I am almost afraid to stay here.
Our enemies may come back with more men to
drive us out, or larger bodies of Indians may
accidentally find us. Our horses have no
water and we cannot leave the thicket if we
are surrounded. I think we should find a better
place, even if it is dangerous to travel by
daylight.”




CHAPTER V—THROUGH A DESERTED LAND
=================================

Before they left their hiding-place, Tatanka
tied some small poplar twigs to his head
and climbed the highest tree in the grove.

“I can see not a man nor horse,” he reported.
“Our enemies have left. Even if
the men were hiding in the grass, I would be
able to see their wagon and horses.”

“The nearest places of safety are Fort
Ridgely and New Ulm,” declared the trapper.
“Should we not try to reach one or the
other?”

“They are not safe now,” objected Tatanka,
after a brief silence. “I have heard
the young warriors brag that a thousand of
them could easily rush both of these places.
We could surely not get into either place
on horseback. We might crawl into them at
night. If you try to go there on horseback,
I shall not go with you.”

“Perhaps you are right,” granted the trapper.
“I do not wish to lose my two fine
horses. Let us try to reach the small lake
and timber north of here. We can water our
horses there and the patch of timber is large
enough so that a small party can not surround
us. And if the worst should happen,
we can abandon our horses and slip away on
foot after dark.”

When they were ready to move, Bill found
little Tim hunting about anxiously through
the brush.

“I can’t find the coon,” he cried. “He
was there before we sat down to eat our cornbread,
but now he has chewed off the string
I tied him with and he is gone.”

The men laughed, but together with Bill
they began to beat the brush and the weeds
for the lost raccoon.

“Little gray Meetcha will be hard to find,”
commented Tatanka. “He may have gone
back to the woods near the river. His kind
does not love the prairie like Hoka, the
badger, who digs the striped gophers out of
their holes.”

After some more searching Bill called out:

“Oh, come here, Tim. Here’s your fool
coon. He’s washing a frog in my well.”

By the time Tim arrived, Meetcha had not
only washed but also eaten his frog.

“You little fool,” Tim cried, as he gently
boxed Meetcha’s ears, “the Sioux will cut off
your tail and boil you in the pot if you run
away from us. Haven’t you heard that war
has begun?”

Meetcha snarled and struck at Tim with
his short fore-paws, but Tim placed his pet
in front of him on the saddle and men and
boys started slowly for the small lake.

However, before they entered the woods,
they halted the horses in an isolated thicket
and Tatanka alone crept slowly through the
grass and tall weeds into the woods.

“Where is he?” asked Bill, when Tatanka
had gone a few rods. “I can’t even see the
grass move, except by the little puffs of
wind.”

“Of course you can’t.” Barker laughed.
“Tatanka would not be a good scout if he
could not vanish in the tall grass.”

Black Buffalo was gone a long time and
Bill and Tim began to think that he would
not come back or that he had been killed.
But the trapper only smiled and said: “You
boys don’t know what patience is. A good
scout or a good hunter must be able to wait
a long time, sometimes a whole day.”

When Tatanka did return he came into the
thicket from the other side and was standing
before them without either of the boys
having seen him approach.

“Where did he come from?” Tim asked,
his big blue eyes showing his surprise, but
the trapper only smiled and said, “He’s our
scout, lads.”

The scout reported that he had gone carefully
through the whole patch of timber, and
that neither in the timber nor on the lake
shore had he seen any fresh sign of Indians
or horses. “But I did see fresh deer sign,”
he concluded. “A buck lives in those woods,
but I did not see him.”

Feeling sure now that they would not fall
into an ambush, the four friends rode into the
woods to find a suitable spot, where they
might conceal themselves till nightfall.

They first watered their horses, taking care
to conceal them behind some overhanging
linden branches, so that they might not be seen
from the other side of the lake. Both the
trapper and Tatanka agreed that it was not
at all likely that any Indians would be in hiding
on the shore of this small lake.

“They are scattered in all directions, killing
people and making booty,” Barker gave
as his opinion. “But it would not surprise
me if toward evening some of those marauding
parties would come along to stop here for
the night.”

The afternoon furnished again a great trial
of patience for the boys. For a while, the
care of their horses and catching frogs for
Meetcha occupied them. Then they picked a
few choke-cherries, but these did not allay
their growing hunger, and the trapper would
not let them pick the laden bushes on the outside
of the timber.

“It would be gross carelessness,” he said,
“to betray our presence in that way. The
man who wishes to carry his scalp out of an
Indian war must not take chances. I’m also
afraid that you boys would get sick if you
filled up on choke-cherries; you had better
starve awhile.”

As the heat of the day decreased, the mosquitoes
became very annoying. Both lads
were tired and sleepy from the excitement
of the day, but there could be no thought of
sleeping. They had to keep off the hungry
insects with pieces of green brush.

The Indian and Barker had each gone to
one end of the timber to watch for unbidden
guests, while the boys were on guard in the
middle of the margin of the timber.

When at last the sun was approaching the
horizon, it seemed to the lads that it was several
days since Mr. Barker had told them to
roll up their blankets and come away.

When the sun was turning red, Tatanka
came back from his watch and gave the call
of Bob-White. The boys at once forgot all
fatigue and ran to their horses.

“Indians, from the east,” Tatanka whispered.
“We must get away. I will take
Mehunka’s horse to him.”

The trapper, although nearly sixty years
old, sprang into the saddle like a young man,
when his three friends met him at the western
point of the timber.

Before they doubled a low hill, which would
hide the lake from their view, Tatanka
stopped behind some box-elder bushes.

“Look,” he said as he pointed eastward,
“there they are.”

A dozen Indians, some on horseback and
others on a stolen farm-wagon, were just
stopping to make camp at the eastern end of
the timber, a quarter of a mile away.

“Won’t they follow us!” asked Bill.
“They might easily find our trail.”

“No,” grunted Tatanka, with plain contempt.
“See what they are doing.”

One of the men was pouring something out
of a jug and each took a drink out of a tin
cup.

“See,” continued the scout—“they have
found a jug of whiskey. They won’t see any
trail. If they were in the Chippewa country,
they would be scalped.”

“Have they any white captives?” asked
Barker.

“No, let the dogs alone,” and with those
words, he led the way around a low hill.

The four travelers rode slowly and silently
over the prairie. The sounds of the summer
night began to fill the air. Overhead a pair
of night-hawks, swooping with a loud whirr
close by the heads of the horses and uttering
their harsh “Paint, paint,” followed the
riders. In the scattered groves which they
passed, some little tree-frogs piped their
monotonous trill, while the undefinable songs
of crickets and grasshoppers filled the air,
seemingly coming from everywhere and nowhere.

An hour they had been riding almost in
silence, when there was a thud and a sprawl
on the grass. Little Tim’s eyes had closed
in sleep and he had fallen off his horse.

“We must find a place to spend the night,”
said the trapper. “The little fellow is all
in.”

“No, I’m awake now,” piped up little Tim,
as he picked up Meetcha and climbed back in
the saddle. “I can ride all right now, Mr.
Barker.”

The first house they reached had been burnt
and the ruins were still smoldering.

Tatanka dismounted and examined the
place for wounded or hidden fugitives, but
there was only the silence of death and desolation.

A few miles farther, they came to a cabin
in a small natural grove.

“That’s Dickman’s place,” the trapper told
his companions. “He has a fine field of corn
and his wife is a good housekeeper. Let us
see what we can find.”

The door stood open and most of the windows
in the two-room cabin were broken.

“Ugh,” grunted the Indian, “the thieves
have been here. We shall find nothing to
eat.”

“Wait a minute,” said Barker. “Let me
look in the smoke-house in the hollow; perhaps
the robbers didn’t find it. Here, boys,” he
laughed, as he returned with a ham and a
side of bacon, “this will help us out.

“Now, Tim, get some green corn and, Bill,
you go and milk the two cows in the yard.
They must have been in the woods when the
Sioux raided the place. Tatanka may listen
for bad sounds, but I think we are safe here
and we shall soon have a real supper.”

In a few minutes Barker had closed the
door, hung a blanket over the two windows, lit
a candle and started a fire in the kitchen
stove. Soon the corn was boiling and slices
of bacon sizzled in the pan. Bill came in with
a pail of milk and Tatanka came in and reported,
“No Dakotahs here.”

No supper ever tasted so good to Bill and
Tim, and the trapper-cook kept putting slices
of bacon in the pan, while his hungry guests
helped themselves as quick as the white slices
curled and browned.

After supper the lads spread their blankets
on the floor, tied Meetcha in the small woodshed
and found a gunny-sack for him to sleep
on.

After the two men had watered the horses
at a near-by pond, tied them in the straw-shed,
and provided them with plenty of hay,
they sat down on the grass to smoke.

“The boys are asleep,” remarked Tatanka,
as he filled his pipe a second time with a mixture
of killikinnick and tobacco.

“They are my boys now,” replied Barker,
“and I shall look after them. I can’t understand
that man Hicks. I declare if I
don’t almost believe he wanted the lads to get
killed. I’d like to break his crooked old
bones.”

“He is a bad man,” Tatanka assented.
“He hides some evil plan in his heart, but I
cannot tell what it is.”

“He does have some evil plan,” exclaimed
the trapper as he struck the ground with his
fist. “I reckon he will try to take the boys
away from me, if he can find us.”

“He is a coward,” continued the Indian;
“he will not come alone, he will bring other
bad men to help him. We must be on our
guard.”

“Tatanka,” said Barker, “I don’t know
yet what I shall do, but Hicks will not get
these lads unless he can take them from me.
Will you stand by me?”

“Tatanka never deserted a friend,” the
Indian replied.

“We must sleep now,” said the trapper
after a long silence. “We may have another
fight to-morrow.”

“I sleep in the shed with the horses,” remarked
the Indian, as he bade his friend
good-night. “The Dakotahs might come and
steal them, if we do not watch.”

The trapper went into the house, set a
strong pole against the door and spread his
blanket near the boys.




CHAPTER VI—DANGEROUS TRAVELING
==============================

The Great Dipper had swung only halfway
around the Polar Star when Tatanka
rapped at the cabin door.

“My friend,” he called, “I think we should
saddle our horses and ride away. At daybreak
the bands of Dakotahs will again start
to kill all white men they can find and to
burn their houses. We should travel a good
stretch before the sun rises, and, may be, in
that way we can leave behind us the part of
the country to which the war has spread.”

The trapper, like most men who have
lived much alone in a wild country, was a
light sleeper and was awake at once.

“Yes,” he replied, “we should travel a
good stretch by starlight. Perhaps we can
thus avoid falling in with any more Sioux
warriors.

“We must take these lads to St. Paul before
that man, Hicks, can find out where we
have gone, and try to overtake us. He will
not hesitate to set the Sioux on our trail, if
he learns which way we have gone.”

Tim and Bill had to be shaken out of a
sound sleep.

“Come along, lads,” Barker told them;
“before the sun rises the Sioux will again be
scouring the country. We must travel by
night as far as we can.”

While the boys were getting ready, Tatanka
and the trapper planned the day’s
journey.

“We should strike out northeast for Shakopee
on the Minnesota River,” advised Tatanka.
“I used to camp and hunt there, when
I was a boy, but it is now a white man’s
town, and I do not think that Little Crow’s
warriors will reach it. They will first try to
take Fort Ridgely and New Ulm beyond the
great elbow of the Wakpah Minnesota.”

“It is a good plan,” assented the trapper.
“Our two guns are loaded with balls that
carry a great distance. Let us put buckshot
into the guns of the boys. If we are attacked,
we will fire our own guns first and use the
buckshot only if the Sioux come close up.”

“It is good,” said Black Buffalo. “If all
white people were prepared like we are, the
warriors of Little Crow would not take many
scalps.”

The morning was chilly. The grass and
flowers of the prairie were heavy with dew
and the little voices of the night had all grown
silent, only a lost dog, bereaved of his master,
could be heard barking and howling in the
distance. They passed a slough, where the
tall rushes and grasses and the pools of open
water were covered with a gray patchy
blanket of fog, out of which rang the loud
quacking calls of wild ducks and the low, retiring
notes of hundreds of coots. From the
blackbirds and swallows which the boys knew
were roosting in the marsh by the thousand,
came not a sound, but from the grass near the
margin of the slough came the liquid, pebbly
song of a marsh-wren.

“Listen, Bill,” whispered Tim, “there’s
the little bird that never sleeps.”

“Oh, I guess he sleeps, all right,” replied
Bill, “only he is so little that he can sleep
enough in snatches.”

“We must ride faster,” said Tatanka.
“The stars are getting small and the eastern
sky will soon be gray, then the Dakotahs will
come out of their camps.”

The four travelers wrapped themselves in
their blankets, and let the willing horses fall
into an easy gallop.

The boys were glad, when, at last, a big red
ball pushed slowly over the distant wooded
bluffs of the Minnesota, but Barker and
Tatanka reined in their horses and approached
the crest of every rise with the utmost
caution. After traveling an hour or
more, in this way, Barker and Tatanka
stopped and dismounted in a small grove of
oaks on a high knoll, after they had made sure
that no tracks led into the patch of timber.

“Here we eat breakfast,” Barker told the
boys.

“Why don’t we hide in a hollow where we
can’t be seen?” asked Bill.

Tatanka laughed at this question. “In
a hollow,” he replied, “Dakotahs see us first;
on a hill, we see them first.”

To the surprise of the boys, the Indian even
started a fire and on several green sticks began
to fry slices of bacon and ham.

“Won’t the Indians see the fire!” asked
Tim.

“Not this fire,” Bill told him. “Don’t you
see that Tatanka breaks from the trees only
the driest sticks that don’t make a bit of
smoke!”

Tim and Meetcha were very hungry and
Meetcha crept, with quivering nostrils very
close to the hot slices of meat, which the Indian
was laying down on some oak leaves, but
Tatanka struck him a sharp blow with a
switch and called, “Raus!” in a loud gruff
voice, so the little raccoon scrambled away in
a great hurry.

“What did he say!” asked the boys. “He
talked German to Meetcha,” Barker laughed.
“He learned it from his neighbors. It
means, ‘Get out.’”

“Meetcha must learn not to steal,” said
Tatanka, with a smile. “He is a little thief.
Tim should let him run in the woods. He
will make much trouble.”

The four travelers enjoyed a hearty breakfast
after their morning ride.

“Boys,” remarked the trapper, “if we eat
at this rate, we shall live on the smell of
hambone to-morrow, unless we make Shakopee tonight.”

There were no dishes to wash and Meetcha
had to eat the scraps without washing them,
although to the delight of both men and boys,
he went through the motions with every piece
he ate.

When the meal was over, Tatanka sat for
a while and smoked in silence, while Barker
and the boys scanned the prairie from the
margin of the grove.

A mile to the south some dark objects were
moving in the direction of the wooded knoll,
but they could not tell what they were.
The boys thought they saw Indians on horseback,
but as Barker did not agree with them
they called Black Buffalo. After he had
looked a minute he said:

“Ox-team and white men. We must wait
for them.”

“How can they get away from the Indians
on an ox-team?” asked Bill.

“They can’t,” explained Barker, “except
by a lucky accident. If any Indians see them,
they are lost.”

When the ox-team came within half a mile
of the knoll, Tatanka pointed to the west.

“Look,” he said, “now we must fight.”

Three Indians on horseback were coming
across the prairie directly toward the white
men, who tried to whip the oxen into a run so
as to reach the wooded knoll.

“Get on your horses,” commanded Barker,
and the four riders threw themselves quickly
between the team and the Sioux.

When the trapper fired a shot at the Sioux,
the three Indians turned and then dispersed
themselves around the team. They fired their
guns, but the bullets all fell short.

On the wagon were two men and several
women and children, and the party had been
traveling all night.

The Indians followed the team for an hour,
but as the party kept to the open prairie, the
Sioux at last fell behind and gave up the
pursuit.

In the middle of the afternoon, the party
reached Henderson, where the owner of the
team stayed with friends, while the four
horsemen rode rapidly on to Shakopee, which
they reached late in the evening.

The news of the outbreak had already
reached the town and the people were much
excited, although no hostile Indians had been
seen in the neighborhood.

On the following day, Wednesday, August
20th, the four horsemen saw no hostile Indians.
There were no telegraph lines in
those days west and southwest of St. Paul,
but the news of the outbreak had reached St.
Paul by special messenger, on Tuesday, the
day after it started.

Barker and his party did not follow the
usual road from Shakopee to St. Paul, but
traveled along old Indian trails and by-paths
with which Barker was well acquainted.
Near the old inn which stood just west of the
Bloomington bridge across the Minnesota,
they rested in the woods until evening, for
it was Barker’s intention to reach St. Paul
after dark.

“I doubt not,” explained the trapper to
Tatanka, “that Hicks, if he is alive, is already
on our trail. He is certainly going to
look for the boys and myself at St. Paul, and
he will most likely strike the road between this
place and St. Paul. If we travel on this
road in the daytime, we shall meet so many
people that it would be an easy thing to follow
us. Everybody would remember you
and me and the small boy with the raccoon, so
we must stay here, until after dark.”

It was shortly after midnight on Thursday
morning, that the travelers reached St. Paul.
Old Joe, the hostler, at one of the outlying
taverns, was not a little surprised to see his
friend Barker appear at this hour of the
day.

“Hello, Sam,” he exclaimed, as he shook
the old man’s hand, “I’m powerful glad to
see you. Only last night I was saying to the
boys, ‘This time they surely got Sam’s scalp.’
Mighty glad I am, they didn’t.”

The horses were soon put in their stalls
and Meetcha was locked up in an empty grain-box
with some kitchen scraps and a pan of
water.

“He will wash bones, wash bones, until daylight.”
Tatanka laughed.

“Now, Joe,” said Barker, as the men were
seated in the small lobby of the tavern and
after the boys had gone to bed, “here is a
chance for you to show that you are my
friend. Don’t tell anybody that we are here.
A lanky, squint-eyed cuss with a scar on his
forehead may show up inquiring for us.
Don’t put him on.”

“Old Joe is no sieve,” replied the hostler.
“You can depend on me.”

Then the men exchanged the news of the
Indian war and the war down South.

The news of the outbreak had reached St.
Paul on Tuesday, Governor Ramsey had at
once appointed Henry H. Sibley of Mendota,
to assume command of a force of men to
march against the Indians, and Sibley was
already on his way with more than a thousand
men.

Barker soon learned that a freighter, the
*Red Hawk*, was due to start down river for
Galena some time Friday evening. The boat
could take but very few passengers, but
through his acquaintance with the mate, the
trapper arranged for passage for himself and
the boys.

When he told Tatanka about his plans, the
Indian did not seem to hear him, but his dark
eyes wandered down the bend of the river,
where the great stream sweeps southward in
a magnificent curve, below the high white
cliffs of the Indian Mounds and the long-lost
Carver’s Cave.

After a long silence, the impassive face of
Tatanka lit up as with the fire of youth.

“I wish to go with you and the white boys,”
he said; “I wish to see once more the Great
River, where my fathers fought the Ojibways,
and the Winnebagoes. I wish to see once
more the long shining Lake Pepin, and its
bold high rocks. There I lived when I was a
little boy, before the first fire-canoe came up
the Great River. My father killed many deer
and my mother caught great fish, many kinds
of fish in the river.

“Wakadan, the bass, the alligator-fish, the
big buffalo-sucker that has no teeth, but has
strength to run through a net, Tamahe, the
pickerel, that has sharp teeth and is the wolf
among fish, and the large black paddle-fish,
besides many, many little fish, black and
golden, and silver, which were caught only by
the small boys.

“My brother, you will need me and I will
go with you and fight with you if the bad
white man comes to take away your boys.

“And I will travel along the Great River
and be happy as I was when I listened to the
the waves of Lake Pepin many winters ago.

“There our people never went hungry and
all were happy, but now the dark clouds hang
over all my people. The soldiers will drive
them away from the Minnesota to the Bad
Lands of the West, where the timber and the
grass are poor.

“Once more, I will travel on the Great
River and then I will join my people far
west, and my friends will bury my bones
where the hungry wolves can not reach
them.”




CHAPTER VII—ON THE GREAT RIVER
==============================

The day before their departure south was
a very busy one for both men and boys.

When Barker told the boys at breakfast
that they would all start down the river in
the evening, it was only the strange place and
people that kept the boys from shouting and
turning somersaults.

“Are you going with us all the way to
Vicksburg? And is Tatanka going?” Tim
asked, big-eyed with suppressed excitement.

“We are both going,” Barker told them,
“if we can get through. We should not have
much trouble until we get to Memphis. Below
Memphis, the river is full of gunboats and
the country full of fighting armies. I don’t
know how we shall manage there. We’ll have
to see, when we get there.”

The four travelers could now take their
horses no farther, and although they disliked
to part with the animals there was nothing
else to do. Old Joe, the hostler, paid them
a fair price for the animals and again pledged
his secrecy.

“There’s a good market now for horses,”
he told his friends, “and I’ll sell them in a
few days. If any inquisitive gent comes
around, I’ll send him about his own business.”

After dark the four friends went on board
the *Red Hawk*.

“You lads keep quiet in your cabin,”
Barker told the boys, “till the boat has
started. Tatanka and I will do a little scouting
till we have cast off.”

The two men took a position behind some
boxes and bales of freight. The landing was
lit by several glaring torches, so that the two
scouts could see clearly every person moving
about, but they could not be seen themselves
from the landing.

The deck-hands were just throwing on the
last sticks of cord-wood and carrying on
board the last sacks of wheat, when a stranger
appeared and spoke to the captain.

“Can you carry another passenger?”
Barker heard him ask. “I have blankets and
can sleep on the deck.”

.. figure:: images/illus-074.jpg
   :figclass: illustration
   :align: center
   :alt: “Walking is good, on you can ride on a log, the water is fine.”

   “Walking is good, on you can ride on a log, the water is fine.”

“Not another soul,” replied the captain.
“Get off the gang-plank, you’re in the way.”

“But I must get to St. Louis,” the man
argued.

“I don’t care what you must do,” the
captain replied gruffly. “Walking is good, or
you can ride on a log, the water is fine. Now
get off the gang-plank. This boat leaves in
five minutes.”

“Hicks,” whispered Tatanka. “Bad man
Hicks,” as the man slouched back up town.
“I’d like to throw my ax at him.”

“It’s a good thing that I described Hicks
to the captain,” Barker chuckled. “The captain
recognized him all right.”

Then the *Red Hawk* gave a long whistle,
the pilot pulled the bell at the engine, there
was a great hissing of steam and the big
stern-wheel noisily churned the brown water
of the Mississippi. Slowly the heavily-laden
boat backed into mid-stream, again the pilot
rang the bell, and the boat made a half-turn
and was headed down-stream.

The boys came out of their cabin.

“How can the pilot find his way?” asked
Bill, “when the night is so pitch-dark?”

“A good pilot knows the river by heart,”
Barker told the boys. “He knows it by day
and by night, and up-stream and downstream.”

At the present time it is comparatively
easy to pilot a steamboat on the Mississippi.
Hundreds of wing-dams, built by the government
engineers, keep the current in the same
channel, and numerous guideboards and
lights on shore tell the pilot where to steer
his boat. In addition to this, the modern
boats are all provided with powerful headlights
and search-lights.

At the time of the Civil War wing-dams,
guideboards, shore-lights, and search-lights
were all unknown. The safety of the Mississippi
steamers depended entirely on the
pilots. Their accurate knowledge of the
river, their skill in handling the wheel, their
quick decision in moments of danger, brought
every year hundreds of boats safely back and
forth between the ports of St. Paul and St.
Louis.

As the *Red Hawk* was gliding by the magnificent
groves of cottonwoods, which begin
to line the Mississippi just below the Indian
Mounds at St. Paul, the trapper and his three
friends were quietly sitting on the upper deck
in front of the pilot-house.

There was little talk, for all were absorbed
in the running of the boat.

Now the boat seemed to be headed into an
absolutely black wall, which proved, however,
to be only the dense shadow caused by the
forest or by a high rocky bank. Had the
pilot not had the nerve to steer straight into
the black shadow, he would have wrecked his
boat among the snags on a sandbar, where
the safe channel seemed to run.

At the end of three hours the boat stopped
at Prescott, at the mouth of the St. Croix, one
of the two navigable tributaries of the upper
Mississippi, near St. Paul and Minneapolis,
almost two thousand miles from the Gulf
of Mexico. Here the river grew wider and
deeper, so that the pilot could pick his way
with a little less anxiety, but to the four
fugitives from the Sioux country, the mystery
continued.

At one moment the boat was headed into a
dark forest of tall cottonwoods and maples,
and a little later the boys felt sure she would
crash against a solid wall of rock, and then
suddenly the river seemed to come to an end.

“We’ve lost the river, we’re in a big
slough,” Tim whispered as he held firmly
to Meetcha.

But always just in time, the wheel turned
just enough and the boat glided safely past
trees and cliffs, past sandbars and snags, and
around every bend and turn.

The four travelers began to feel a little
more at ease now. Tatanka lit his red pipe,
Barker treated himself to a cigar which his
friend Joe had slipped into his pocket, while
the boys began to feel sleepy.

The smokers had taken only a few puffs
when a messenger came. “The captain,” he
said, “wishes you to smoke somewhere else.
The light from your pipe and cigar bothers
the pilot, so he can’t see where he is steering.”

“The boy is lying,” Tatanka murmured.

“No, he is not,” Barker dissented. “I
have often heard the pilots say that on a
dark night like this, the light from a pipe or
cigar annoys them so much that they cannot
steer right. We must find another place.”

It was not long before all four of the friends
sought their beds. The boat stopped for
more freight at Red Wing; and at Lake City,
at the head of Lake Pepin, it was delayed
until noon by some necessary repairs on the
engine.

The first mate who took charge of the boat
at noon was in doubt whether he should wait
for a threatening storm to pass before he
started down the lake, but the captain was
impatient.

“We have already lost five hours,” he remarked.
“Start her off, she is well built, a
little wind won’t hurt her. I am in a hurry
with that war freight.”

Lake Pepin is only a widened Mississippi.
On account of long bars of silt and sand
which the Chippewa River has thrown across
the Mississippi, the river has backed up till
it fills the whole valley, two miles wide, and
twenty miles long. On this long, deep body
of water, the wind and waves attain a terrific
sweep, and many a boat, safe enough on the
river, has met disaster on Lake Pepin.

While the *Red Hawk* was lying at Lake
City, a strong wind had been blowing from
the south toward great masses of clouds that
were rising in the north. When she headed
down the lake the wind died down, but half an
hour later it broke with a gale from the north,
carrying before it whirling clouds and sheets
of swishing rain that hid from view the high
bluffs on either side.

Almost at once, as if by the magic of a
demon, the lake was in an uproar with a
smashing sea of foaming, toppling white-capped
waves, which together with the raging
wind, threatened to throw the *Red Hawk*
out of her course into the trough of the
waves.

The pilot strained every nerve and muscle
to keep her headed toward the foot of the
lake. He signalled to the engineer for full
steam ahead, because a boat at high speed is
more easily steered than one at low speed.

For a while, all went well. Then a sharp
snap was heard at the engine. The wheel
stopped turning at once, and the boat swung
helpless into the trough of the sea, while big
splashing waves began to break over the low
sides of the vessel and into the hold.

“The Wakon, the bad spirit, will swallow
the ship,” Tatanka murmured. “We must
all try to swim ashore.”

One of the piston-rods had broken and one
engine alone could not turn the big stem-wheel,
but Captain Allen did not mean to give
up his boat without a fight. In five minutes
the carpenters were at work spiking together
two long wide planks. A heavy rope, twice
as long as the planks, was tied to each end of
the planks. To the middle of this rope the
ship’s hawser was fastened, and the sea
anchor was ready.

“Heave her over,” commanded the captain,
and within a few minutes the boat swung
around with her bow to the wind.

It was high time. For the waves had put
out the fires, and the pumps had stopped
working.

A little longer and she would have filled
and sunk in thirty feet of water. As it was,
she drifted fast before the wind, and in a
little more than half an hour she crashed
against the rocks on the Wisconsin shore,
where storm and waves broke her to pieces.




CHAPTER VIII—AFTER THE WRECK
============================

Although the *Red Hawk* and her cargo
were a complete loss, all on board reached
land safely. With the wreckage of the boat,
the men built a fire to dry themselves and
from a box of bread and bacon which the
waves threw ashore, they made a frugal supper.
The four travelers for the South had
saved their guns and blankets and all spent
the night near a big fire as best they could.

The next day, Tatanka built a tepee, using
blankets and canvas instead of the deerskins
and buffalo skins he had learned to use when
he was a boy. The company was indeed
much in need of some kind of shelter because
little Tim was not at all himself. He tried
bravely not to “lie down,” as he said, but
his head ached, his face was flushed and at
times he had a high fever.

“I fear the boy will be sick,” said Tatanka.
“I will fix him a tea.”

Tim had the dislike of most small boys
for medicine, but he drank down a large
cupful of hot tea made by steeping some green
plants in hot water. Then Tatanka covered
him up with several blankets to produce
sweating.

“It is good medicine,” the Indian remarked.
“It is the way our women cure their
children, and the missionaries also say it is
good medicine.”

After a few days, the four travelers moved
to a permanent camp a little way below the
foot of Lake Pepin and about a mile below
Reed’s Landing.

At this place were several stores, and the
landing owed its existence to the fact that
early in spring goods were delivered here and
hauled by wagon to the head of the lake, where
they were loaded on other steamers for shipment
to St. Paul. For the ice sometimes remains
in Lake Pepin two weeks longer than
in any other part of the upper river.

Barker and Black Buffalo had intended to
take the next boat to St. Louis, but Little Tim
grew so sick that it was impossible to move
him, and the men decided that they would
have to take care of the sick boy as well as
they could.

“He has the long fever,” declared Tatanka,
“and he will be sick a long time. May be till
the Mississippi freezes over.”

Tim did have a long sickness. He had no
pain, he had no appetite, and his small body
often burnt with a high fever.

If a doctor could have been consulted, he
would have said that Tim had a fairly mild
case of typhoid fever, but there was no doctor
within fifty miles of Reed’s Landing. Barker
and Tatanka had both seen cases like Tim’s
and felt that in time the little fellow would get
well again.

“We shall stay here till the Great River
freezes over,” said Tatanka, after a week had
passed. “A sick boy cannot travel.”

Tatanka built another tepee, which he and
Bill occupied, while the trapper slept in the
first tepee with the sick boy. The two men
bought a boat of the trader and finished a
canoe the trader had begun. They also built
of logs and rough boards a shack for winter
use, doing the work whenever they had plenty
of time.

.. figure:: images/illus-084.jpg
   :figclass: illustration
   :align: center
   :alt: The two men bought a boat of the trader.

   The two men bought a boat of the trader.

“A tepee,” Tatanka said, “is a good house
in summer and fall, but in winter it is too
cold for white people, who are not used to
it.”

Both the trapper and Black Buffalo did all
they could to make the sick boy comfortable.
They gathered wild cherries and gave him the
juice to drink; they made soup of prairie
chicken, grouse, and wild duck.

“You must drink the good soup,” said
Barker, “for when the lake freezes up you
and Bill must go skating and you must be
big and strong when we get home to Vicksburg.”

It was not difficult for the trapper and the
Indian to secure enough food, for both of
them knew how to gather the wild foods of
woods, river, and marsh.

It was not getting to be the time when the
great waves of bird life roll southward, and
as the Mississippi and its grand winding bottoms
are one of the great highways of the
winged millions, there was an endless procession
of flocks coming and going.

When little Tim had a good day and the
weather was mild, the trapper carried the
sick boy to a spot where he could see the shining
river and the wooded bluffs, gorgeous in
autumn colors, for no river in the world surpasses
the upper Mississippi in the almost inconceivable
profusion of autumn flowers and
in the gorgeous effects of mixed and blended
green, gold, orange, reds, and crimson, all
painted on a canvas far too vast for any
human artist and almost too grand for human
eye to drink in.

And above all this beauty on earth, spread
the blue sky, with fleecy white clouds floating
eastward.

“Uncle Barker,” the boy would ask, “what
are the birds almost touching the clouds?”

“I can hear their call,” the old trapper answered,
glad that Tim was beginning to take
an interest in things, “I think they are martins,
the kind that nested in the hollow trees at
Fort Ridgely and in the big house the soldiers
had built for them.”

Near the tepees stood an immense hollow
elm. Around this tree a small flock of swifts
gyrated in wide, noisy circles every evening.

“What are they doing!” asked Bill.
“Where are they going?”

Tatanka smiled. “The Indian boys
know,” he answered. “If your eyes are
sharp, you can tell.”

Then Bill watched. Every time the swarm
sailed, noisily chirping, over the big tree,
some of the birds suddenly turned their wings
against the air, and dropped into the dark
hollow like so many stones. After half an
hour the last bird had dropped to its sleeping-perch
and Bill thumped the tree with his
ax; he laid his ear to the tree and heard a
great humming as of a hundred swarms of
bees, and a few of the birds came out and
fluttered about.

“Don’t disturb them, Bill,” the trapper
urged. “They have been on the wing all day
and we should let them rest. Some people
say they have no feet, but they have, only
they are very small and the swifts use them
merely for clinging to walls of hollow trees
at night. It is a queer way of sleeping, but
the best they can do, for they never sleep in
any other way.”

Nowadays not many swifts sleep in hollow
trees, for most of these natural homes of the
bears, raccoons, and swifts are gone, but the
light-winged swifts have found other sleeping-places;
they roost by thousands in chimneys
of court-houses, churches, and schools.
And before white men light their fires, when
the days begin to grow cold, the swifts have
assembled in great flocks on the Gulf of Mexico,
whence they go to spend the winter in
Central and South America.

Bill took great delight in bringing his sick
brother a handful of the most beautiful flowers
of the bottom forest, the scarlet lobelia,
or cardinal flower. Tim was not alone in enjoying
these dazzling red flowers. A flock of
humming-birds soon found them and came to
them several times every day. Within reach
of the boys’ hands, the little bird gems hung
motionless on invisible wings. ‘At times they
perched, and preened their delicate plumage
for ten minutes at a time. Tim laughed for
the first time, when two of the midgets of the
air had a fight. They squeaked like mice, as
they threatened angrily to spear each other
with their long sharp bills.

“They are funny little things,” Tim said,
as he turned over and went to sleep.

“The boy will get well,” remarked
Tatanka. “When a sick person laughs, he gets
well again.”

One warm day rather late in September,
the trapper proposed a new kind of hunting
to Bill. “Let us go on a bee hunt,” he said;
“Tatanka will stay with Tim.”

Bill had never heard of a bee hunt, and
wanted to know what Mr. Barker wanted to
do with the bees.

“We don’t want the bees,” the trapper explained;
“we want to get some honey, and
in order to do that we have to find the nest
of a swarm of wild honey-bees.”

The trapper made a little box of bark and
caught a bee, after it had worked for quite a
while on a clump of goldenrod.

In an open place, he let the bee go. “Now,
watch,” he said to Bill, “and point your
finger in the direction it flies and run after
it as far as you can follow it.”

Bill did not know why he should run after
the bee, but he followed through grass and
weeds until he tumbled over a hidden log.

Barker laughed when Bill picked himself
out of the weeds.

“That’s fine,” he commented. “My eyes
are getting a little dull on such small creatures
and I can’t run as fast as I once could,
so I took you along to do the spying and the
running. You see, we know now that this
bee goes east from here to reach its home.”

The two hunters now walked a few hundred
yards in the same direction and then caught
another bee. Again Bill saw the liberated insect
make a straight line eastward.

In this manner, they proceeded until they
came close to the bluffs on the Wisconsin side.

“We’re on their line, all right,” Barker
expressed himself gleefully. “If it doesn’t
end at some settler’s bee-hive, we ought to
find our bee-tree pretty soon.”

The next bee surprised Bill by going directly
west; but the trapper clapped his hands
and called: “We’ve passed the tree, so we’ll
just work back carefully and watch for a
good-looking hollow tree. If we can’t find it,
we shall have to run a cross-line, which is
sure to find it.”

But they found the wild bees, at the next
trial, without running a cross-line. “Here
they are, here they are!” Bill called, as he
stood under a big white-oak.

Hundreds of black bees were entering and
leaving a knot-hole about six feet above the
ground.

“It’s a big swarm,” Barker told the boy;
“and they are in a good place for us. Sometimes
they go into a hollow limb thirty feet
high, where you can’t get at them.

“To-morrow, we’ll come back and get some
honey. Now let’s go home and tell Tim and
Tatanka about our luck.”




CHAPTER IX—HUNTING BEES AND DRIVING FISH
========================================

Tatanka was not enthusiastic about the
prospect of a bee hunt.

“The Indians,” he told his friends, “do
not like the little black honey-flies. They call
them white men’s flies, because they came into
our country with the white man. We like
Tumahga-tanka, the big bumblebee, that
builds his cells in an old mouse-nest on the
ground. But Tumahga-tanka is like the Indians:
he gathers only very little honey food,
just for a day or two. Only our small boys
hunt them and take their little honey in the
evening when their wings are cold and stiff so
they cannot fly on the naked body of the boys
and sting them.

“The little honey-flies are like white men.
They gather much honey for many days of
rain and for all the moons of winter. They
make a store in a big tree and fill it with
honey, so they can stay at home and eat
honey till the maple buds break and till the
wild plums and wild strawberries hang out
their white flowers. They are like white men,
who work all the time and gather big houses
full of corn and meat and make big woodpiles
for the winter.

“Tumahga-tanka is like the Indian. He
travels much, he often sleeps among the flowers
at night, and he is always poor and hungry
like the Indian.”

“Where do the bumblebees go in winter,”
asked Tim, “if they do not gather enough
honey to live on?”

Tatanka did not know. “Perhaps they
sleep like Mahto, the bear, or like Meetcha,
the bear’s little brother.”

“Will you go with us?” asked Barker,
“when we go to get the honey?”

“Yes, I will go with you,” Tatanka promised.
“But I do not like to fight the little
black bees. They are as many as leaves on a
tree, and they will get very angry and will
sting when you come to rob them of their
food.”

“Why shouldn’t we go at night, when they
can’t see us and when it is too cool for them
to fly much?” asked Bill.

“No,” said Barker, “we shall go in daylight,
when we can see what we are doing.”

The sun was already several hours high,
next morning, when the bee-hunters were
ready.

Under a clump of sumachs Barker prepared
himself for the raid. He tied a piece of mosquito
netting over his hat and face. The
sleeve of his hunting-shirt he tied firmly to
his wrists, and he put on his buckskin hunting-gloves.

“Now, I’m ready,” he laughed. “You can
sit down and watch me.”

With a saw, he had procured from the
trader at Reed’s Landing, he rapidly made
two cuts in the tree, one near the ground and
the other just below the knot-hole entrance.

The bees came pouring out of the knot-hole.
Hundreds and thousands of them buzzed
madly about the trapper’s head; they crawled
all over him, trying to find a spot where they
could sting the robber of their treasure-house.

Some of the angry bees discovered the two
spectators and Meetcha. Bill let out a yell
and ran. Tatanka tried to fight them off,
but some got into his hair. He gave a ringing
Sioux warwhoop and tumbled after Bill
in a most ludicrous manner. Little gray
Meetcha had been watching the fun as if
puzzled at the strange behavior of his master.
But now a mad bee buzzed right into
the hairs of his ear. Meetcha seemed to listen
a second, then he began to paw his ears frantically
and to roll in the grass. Now he sat
up again, as if to listen. Some more bees
were after him. Again he pawed his ears
wildly, and rolled on the grass as if he were
performing in a circus. Then he scampered
hurriedly after Bill and Tatanka.

When Barker had finished his cross-cuts
with the saw, he began to use his sharp ax
vigorously and with the aid of an iron wedge,
such as wood-cutters use, he split a large slab
out of the hollow tree.

There was the wild bee hive, full of great
irregular combs of honey, white, yellow, and
brown!

The hunter gave a yell. “Come on, boys,”
he shouted; “get your honey. We could fill
a wash-tub full. The biggest lot of wild
honey I ever saw.”

The bees had almost stopped swarming
about the hunter and had settled in black
masses on the broken combs and were gorging
themselves on the dripping honey.

Bill and Tatanka would not come near the
tree.

“I am not afraid to fight the Chippewas,”
remarked Tatanka, “but I do not like the little
black bees.”

Barker filled a birch-bark bucket with honey
and then put the slab again in place on the
tree.

“I left them enough for the winter,” he
told his friends. “It would not be right to
rob the little creatures of all, because it is so
late in the season now that they could not
gather another supply for the winter.”

Little Tim enjoyed very much the story
Bill told him of the bee hunt, and he laughed
heartily when his brother told how Meetcha
had fought the angry bees. However, although
Tim was now well on the road to
recovery, it was quite evident that he could
not go on the long journey to Vicksburg before
winter, and Barker and Tatanka made
their preparations to winter in the river bottom
below Lake Pepin.

The trapper had bought a gill-net about
fifty feet long and on the first warm day after
the bee hunt, he proposed a fishing trip to
Beef Slough, one of the sluggish side-channels
of the Mississippi.

One who has never seen the Great River is
apt to imagine that, like smaller rivers, it has
only one channel, but below the mouth of the
St. Croix, it generally flows in one main channel
and one or more side-channels. The
steamboats naturally take the main channel,
but hunters, canoeists, and fishermen often
find their best sport on the side-channels, or
sloughs, as they are often called..

Bill was in a flutter of excitement when he
and Barker arrived at Beef Slough, for he
had never fished with a gill-net. The trapper
first cut two stout poles, to each of which he
tied one end of the net. He next set the net
across the slough so that it reached almost
from side to side.

A gill-net really consists of three nets.
The net in the middle has small meshes and is
made of rather fine twine, the two nets on the
outside have very large meshes, a foot or
more square. When a fish runs against the
middle net, the fine meshes catch him behind
the gills and hold him, or, if he is very big
and strong, he makes a pocket of the small net
in trying to push through it and thus gets tangled
up and caught.

After Barker had set the net, he told his
boy companion: “Now, Bill, we’ll make a big
drive.”

Bill did not know what Barker meant by
making a drive for fish. He had heard of
the Indians driving buffalo, but he did not
get much time to think about the new kind of
drive.

“Take that long pole and get into the boat
with me,” the trapper told him, as he paddled
up the slough a little way.

“Now,” he ordered, as he turned around
and started back toward the net, “beat the
water with that pole and make as much noise
as you can.”

Very soon the two men could see streaks in
the smooth water. “Oh, I see,” exclaimed
Bill, as he splashed the water to right and
left, “we’re trying to drive them into the net.
There, we’ve got one! See the float go down.
There’s another one. Watch the big one!
He isn’t going in. Look at him. See him
run along the net. Look at him! He’s run
around the net and is going down the river
like a streak!”

“He is a big old buffalo-sucker,” the trapper
laughed. “He is too wise to be caught in
a gill-net.”

“Say, Mr. Barker,” the boy asked, “can
fish think?”

“I reckon some of the old ones can,” Barker
answered. “Well never catch that big
fellow. I think he weighs fifteen pounds, I
reckon his nose has touched a net before.”

The net was literally filled with fish of
many kinds, suckers, pickerel, pike, bass, big
sunfish, and fierce-looking gars.

“We don’t want those alligators,” the boy
remarked, when the trapper threw several of
the gars into the boat. “They have a long
snout and are covered with horny plates just
like alligators,” the boy continued. “They
surely would be alligators if they had legs. I
couldn’t eat them.”

“That’s all right,” Barker laughed. ”You
needn’t. Most white men throw them away,
but I learned from the Indians how to fix
them. You pour boiling water on their plates
and they come off in big pieces. Their meat
has a fine flavor and they don’t have any
sharp little bones like pickerel and most of the
suckers. I think you’ll eat them after they
are smoked or fried.”



CHAPTER X—CATCHING A MONSTER
============================

Bill helped Tatanka and Barker to smoke
the fish they had caught and then was ready
for another trip.

“Can’t we go again, before it gets too
cold?” he asked. “Let us go again, Mr.
Barker, this meat won’t last long. I just
wish Tim could go, too!”

The old trapper himself had also caught
the fever. “I reckon, boy,” he admitted,
“we ought to make another haul or two, but
the next time we’ll take a seine. Did you
ever fish with a seine! It is more fun than
with a gill-net, but we must go soon, before
the water gets too cold, for in seining, the
fisherman gets as wet as the fish.”

On the next warm day, Barker remarked at
breakfast: “Bill, this looks like a good day.
I guess we’ll be off right away.”

The two fishermen rode down stream to a
place where a deep bayou or slough joined
the main river. They started to seine half
a mile up the bayou. One end of the seine
was tied to a stout pole driven into the bottom
of the bayou. The other end, they swung
around in a half-circle, Bill rowing the boat
and the trapper managing the seine from the
stern of the boat. They caught all kinds of
fish in the same manner that boys and fishermen
catch minnows. Their troubles began
when they started to make a haul in a strong
current in deep water near the mouth of the
bayou. The net caught on a submerged
stump and could not be pulled off against the
current.

“I reckon we’re stuck,” said Barker, as he
found it impossible to move the seine either
one way or the other.

“Let me dive in and fix it,” begged the boy,
as he began to strip. Barker thought the
water was too cold, but Bill said he wouldn’t
mind it, and it wouldn’t take long to try it.

Bill splashed some water over himself and
then swam quickly to the spot where the net
was caught. He dived, opened his eyes and
could see clearly every mesh of the net as it
was held fast by the current over a sharp
stump. He lifted it off quickly and threw it
over the stump down stream and struck out
for shore. His skin was blue and his teeth
chattered as he hurriedly got into his clothes.
Then he ran back and forth on the sand a few
minutes to get warm.

“Now, Mr. Barker,” he said, “let’s make
the haul and see what we get out of this deep
hole. There ought to be some big ones in it.”

Both men slowly pulled the seine through
the deep hole, where by means of small leads
attached to the lower edge of the seine, the
big drag-net swept the bottom, driving all
deep-water fish before it.

As the bag-like middle part of the seine
slowly crept into shallower water on a rising
sandbank, there was a great stir in the enclosed
pool. Big fish of several kinds came
to the surface. Some showing a silvery flash
for just a moment, dived again to the bottom
in their attempt to escape, others, bolder or
made more desperate, shot with a loud splash
over the seine back into free water.

Bill pulled as he had never pulled on anything
before.

“Pull, Mr. Barker, pull!” he shouted.
“We’ve got a wagon-load of big ones, but
they’re breaking away.”

The old trapper pulled as hard as Bill, but
he didn’t hear what Bill called to him, for the
fish in their last desperate effort to escape
made a deafening confusion and noise with
splashing, jumping and flapping about. The
big bag was alive with a wildly struggling
mass of fish of all sizes; and so heavy was
the catch that the two fishermen could not
move the net another inch.

“Drop the rope,” commanded the old man,
“and throw them out on the sand.”

As Bill sprang into the shallow water, a big
flopping fish, the like of which he had never
seen before, got between his legs and laid him
sprawling flat on his stomach amongst the
madly struggling fish. In a moment Bill was
on his feet again.

“Help me, Mr. Barker, help me,” he called.
“I can’t hold him; he’ll get away!”

“Grab him in the gills!” the trapper
shouted, as much excited as his boy friend.

The black giant was just splashing into
open water when Bill threw himself forward
and caught him firmly in the gills.

“Catch him, Mr. Barker, catch him!” Bill
spluttered as he blew the water out of his
nose and mouth. “I can’t lift him.”

By their united effort, they dragged the
monster on shore.

“We’ve caught a whale, a real whale,” Bill
shouted, and danced around like a wild Indian.
“What is it, Mr. Barker! Is it a
whale?”

“It is a paddle-fish, but sure a big one, I
reckon,” the trapper told him as he dragged
the ungainly monster into the grass. “He
must weigh a hundred pounds, and he measures
six feet, if he measures an inch.”

Sorting the fish and loading them into the
boat took some time, and when the work was
done, the two fishermen could not help laughing
at each other. Their clothes were dripping
wet and covered with mud and fish-scales
all over, but they had a boat-load of
fish.

“That’s all a part of fishing,” Barker remarked,
with his quiet smile. “It is a saying
among us trappers that dry fishermen and
wet hunters have had poor luck. I guess our
luck was worth getting soaked for.”

Before they started for camp all small fish
or fish not wanted were put back in the water.
Bill had already learned the maxim of the
old trapper: “Never waste any of God’s
wild bread and meat. What you do not need
to-day, you may want badly to-morrow.”

“I have seen the days,” the old man had
often told the boys, “when I was mighty
glad to dip a mess of minnows out of a spring-hole
in winter, and I have many times thanked
the Good Lord that porcupines can’t run as
fast as deer.

“One winter while I was trapping in
upper Michigan I lost my gun while crossing
a treacherous stream, and if I could not have
killed porcupines, fool-hens, and snowshoe
rabbits with a club, I should have had to pull
out of the country and leave my traps and
furs.”

When they arrived at camp, Tim was wild
at the sight of the giant paddle-fish, and the
boys found that the odd paddle-shaped snout
of the fish was almost half the length of the
fish.

“What does he do with his big paddle?”
Tim wanted to know. But neither the
Indian nor the trapper could answer the question.

“Have they a paddle when they are just
hatched?” Bill asked, but neither Tatanka
nor Barker had ever seen a paddle-fish less
than a foot long.

The life of the paddle-fish or spoonbill is a
mystery to this day, and little more is known
of it now than was known to Indians and
whites when Bill and Tim camped on Lake
Pepin.

The armor-plated gars and paddle-fish are
found only in the Mississippi and its tributaries,
while bass and pickerel and eel are
found in most waters flowing into the North
Atlantic, both in America and Europe.

Both gar and spoonbill are still caught in
Lake Pepin. A European fish, the German
carp, has become naturalized in the Mississippi
basin and many carloads of it are
shipped to Eastern markets every year.
However, the game fish of the old days are
still all there and will never become scarce,
if good fish and game laws are wisely administered.

In the days of Barker and Tatanka, fishing
with any kind of net or tackle was lawful, but
to-day both commercial fishermen and anglers
have to observe the laws, or our lakes
and streams will become fished out; for the
resources and gifts of nature are not inexhaustible,
and the number of men and boys
who go fishing increases each year.

For fishing, camping, and canoeing, for
grand scenery, for house-boating, motor-boating,
for trees, flowers, and birds and for
all kinds of water creatures such as clams,
crayfish and muskrats, the Mississippi, the
“Everywhere River” of the Chippewa Indians,
has no equal on the northern hemisphere
and is surpassed only by the Amazon
of South America.

In the Itasca Forest of Minnesota, the Mississippi
begins as a tiny stream, which sometimes
loses itself in a tamarack swamp, and
which the beaver people, the little animal engineers,
can easily dam with mud and brush.
When it leaves Itasca, it is large enough to
carry a canoe. But the rippling little creek
grows rapidly by receiving the water from
many lakes and streams and long before
it reaches Minneapolis, where it furnishes
power to grind the wheat grown over half a
continent, it is a stately navigable river,
whose enormous volumes of flood-water only
the most skillful engineer can control.




CHAPTER XI—AFTER WILD GEESE
===========================

Late in October, when one of the last boats
was stopping at Reed’s Landing, Barker and
Tatanka were watching the boat from a
small window in the store.

“Look, brother,” the Indian whispered;
“there is the bad white man.”

On deck stood Hicks with two companions
talking and gesticulating. Hicks evidently
wanted to get off the boat, but the other two
men persuaded him to stay on board.

The steamer stopped only a few minutes to
take on cargo and passengers before it proceeded
on its way to St. Louis.

“He has hunted for us in Minnesota a long
time,” Barker laughed. “Now, I think we
are rid of him for a while. I suppose he has
made up his mind that we have gone on to
Vicksburg and he is going to follow us. Well,
let him go. By this time the parents of the
boys must have the letters which the boys and
I sent them through a friend in a Missouri
regiment, and they will not be worried by any
lies Hicks may tell them. But I would just
like to find out why he was so anxious to keep
these boys in Minnesota and expose them to
the scalping-knives of the Indians.”

After the men had completed their purchases,
they returned to their camp, but they
said nothing to the boys about Hicks and his
companions.

The southward flight of ducks and geese
and other water fowl was now at its height,
and the campers had added a liberal supply of
wild ducks to their store of smoked fish.

The first ducks to go south were the blue-winged
teals, small birds which whizzed over
the camp in immense flocks at the rate of sixty
or more miles an hour. A little later, the
northern ducks, blue-bills, and mallards had
come down in immense flocks. But Tatanka
and Barker were waiting for still larger
game.

“We ought to get some geese,” the Indian
suggested, and one evening as they were
watching the flight of a long line of great
honking geese, they saw two or three hundred
of them settle on a long sandbar a mile
below their camp. “Yon and Bill must rise
early,” said the Indian. “Perhaps you can
get some of them.”

Long before daybreak next morning, Barker
awakened the soundly sleeping boy.

“Get up, Bill!” he called. “We’ll have a
cup of coffee and then we’ll try our luck at
the geese.”

Very quietly, without waking Tim, the two
hunters slipped out of camp and got into
their boat.

Soon they glided silently down stream. A
mist was hanging over the river and large
drops of moisture were falling off the trees
along shore. Bill was shivering with cold
and excitement.

“My, but it is dark and the water looks awfully
cold and gloomy,” whispered Bill. “I
would be afraid to go down the river alone.
Listen!” he said under his breath, “I think
I heard a wolf howl.”

“No,” the trapper quieted him, “the big
wolves have left this country. Listen again.”

The sounds were nearer now. “Oh, it is a
big hoot-owl. Several of them. They are
answering each other.

“They make a noise like ghosts,” he continued,
as a deep guttural, “Whoo-who-whooo,”
came from a maple thicket close by.
“My hair is trying to stand up under my cap,
though I know they never attack anything but
rabbits and woodchucks.”

The two hunters were now paddling along
a side-channel which entered the main river
near the point where they expected to find
the geese.

“Be very quiet,” Barker cautioned the boy.
“Geese not only have sharp eyes, but their
hearing is very acute. If they hear any suspicious
sounds there will be a grand flapping
of wings and the whole flock will be off to
some other place.”

The wind was coming from the south, and
for that reason the hunters had landed north
of the sandbar.

“Mr. Barker,” asked the boy, “can geese
and ducks smell the hunter!”

“I don’t know,” replied the trapper. “I
never thought of it and never heard it said
that they could. Moose and deer and wolves
can smell a man a mile off, and they can hear
a man’s talk a quarter of a mile away; but I
don’t think that birds are guided by scent at
all.”

“Do the sleeping geese put somebody on
guard!” the lad inquired.

“I don’t think they have any system of
guards, but some of them are always standing
with their heads up, and the old ganders
are most watchful. If one goose becomes
alarmed, they all go.

“You must only whisper now. I think we
are getting pretty close to them. Step carefully,
so you don’t break any sticks. All wild
creatures take alarm at the snapping of sticks.
I suppose they think a wolf or some other
beast of prey is after them.”

The trapper went cautiously to the edge of
the timber and looked down stream.

“I can’t see the sandbar yet,” he told his
companion. “We must creep along a little
farther. We have to be ready at daybreak,
for soon after they will all go to feed on some
shallow water, or most likely on some stubble-field
beyond the bluff.

“These Canada geese feed much like tame
geese, they like to pick the ears of grain out
of the stubble and they like all kinds of young
green stuff. In early spring they are very
fond of grazing on young winter wheat and
rye.”

“Couldn’t you tame them?” asked the boy.

“Yes, very easily,” the trapper told him,
“but they don’t breed till they are at least
two years old, and they will fly away in the
fall unless their wings are clipped.

“Mallard ducks are easily tamed, too, but
they will also fly away in fall if their wings
are not clipped. I think most of our tame
ducks came from wild mallards, a long time
ago.”

“Is it true,” the boy wanted to know, “that
ducks and geese cannot fly in August?”

“Yes, that’s no foolish tale. Ducks and
geese lose all their big wing-feathers at the
same time, so that for about two weeks in
August they cannot fly. I have come upon
a flock of a thousand ducks that spattered
about like mud-hens. But their big feathers
grow very fast, and they have remarkably
strong muscles. I think at this time of the
year, in October, they can fly a thousand miles
without resting.”

For some time, the hunters continued to
pick their way slowly and silently, now
through the tall dripping sawgrass, then in
the dark shadow of dense river-bottom maples.

Again the trapper crept out into the open,
while Bill held his breath waiting for the return
of his friend.

“I can’t see them yet,” the old man reported,
“but I can hear them cackle. We
had better wait here till it is light enough
to shoot.”

Daylight seemed a very long time coming,
but at last the stars began to fade behind the
Wisconsin bluffs, while the woods on the
Minnesota hills began to stand out like long
black streaks.

“Now,” whispered Barker, “look at your
gun. It is time to begin our stalk. Don’t
shoot blindly into the flock, but aim at your
bird and take it from below or behind. We
must not drop any bird crippled, and let it
get away. That is poor sportsmanship.”

Without another word, the two hunters
crept along for a hundred yards. Barker
stepped slowly behind a willow-bush and motioned
the boy to follow him.

A large flock of big dark birds were sitting
and standing within easy range. Many were
still asleep with their heads under-their wings,
some were preening their feathers and half
a dozen stood watchful with their long necks
erect.

One big old gander became restless. He
seemed to be looking and listening in the direction
of the hunters. He stood still a few
seconds. Then he uttered a loud honk and
with a great thunderous flapping of their big
wings, the while flock rose in the gray morning
air.

Both hunters fired twice, and four of the
big birds dropped before they could get under
way. Three fell on the sand dead, but
the fourth turned and fell into the brush some
hundred yards below them.

“Mark the spot,” ordered Barker, “and
load your gun. Be quick, or we’ll lose it.”

They hurried to the spot where the goose
had dropped into the bushes. A few
scattered feathers were there, but no bird.

“Now we must circle around to find that
goose,” Barker told his companion. “It
can’t have gone far.”

For half an hour they searched the whole
neighborhood with the greatest care, but not
a trace did they discover of the wounded bird.

“I reckon we have to give it up,” the trapper
said at last. “It beats me how a wild
creature can hide itself. Perhaps the goose
got back into the water and is now swimming
down the river.

“I have known a wounded duck to dive and
bite itself fast to some bottom weeds and die
without coming up.”

Tatanka had a big breakfast ready when
the hunters reached camp and after breakfast
Bill and Barker dressed and smoked their
game.

“We had better keep this meat for winter,”
the trapper suggested, “for until it freezes
up, we can get all the fresh meat we want.”

Tim, who used to amuse himself for hours
at a time by playing with Meetcha, was in
great anxiety, because the pet raccoon had
once more mysteriously disappeared.

Bill and Barker and the Indian looked in
every place, where Meetcha was accustomed
to dig for grubs or hunt for frogs, but he
was not to be found.

“He has gone to find a sleeping-place for
the winter,” Tatanka told his friends. “He
feels that it is growing cold.”

Tatanka’s guess proved true, for on the
second day, Meetcha was found curled up and
fast asleep in a hollow log a quarter of a mile
from camp.

“We’ll fix him,” said Tatanka, as he cut
off the branches of the hollow basswood.

Meetcha woke up, but recognizing his
friends, did not come out of the log.

“Now help me carry the log home.”

Tim clapped his thin hands with joy when
the three coon-hunters arrived at camp and
laid the log down in a sheltered spot.

One end of the log was naturally closed, and
Tim filled the other end with dry leaves. In
this way Meetcha followed the custom of his
tribe and went into winter quarters.

On warm days he came out again, but
whenever the weather turned cold and
stormy, he crawled back into his hollow log.

CHAPTER XII—IN A WINTER CAMP
============================

The last days of October were cold and
windy and it seemed as if the north wind
drove all wild birds before it. Thousands
of robins and little yellow-patched birds, the
hardy myrtle-warblers, filled the timber on
the river islands. Long dark clouds of different
kinds of blackbirds passed southward,
great whitish gulls came drifting along from
somewhere, and the black terns, dull colored
in summer, had donned their white autumn
plumage.

“I believe I saw 500,000 ducks to-day,”
said the trapper as he returned to camp one
evening with all the mallards he could carry.

“The birds are going fast, and it will soon
be winter. We must cut a lot of wood and
pull our boats up to a high place, so they will
not freeze in. These woods may be under
water next spring and we may need our boats
in a hurry.”

Early in November came one of those cold
rain-storms that mark sharply the end of Indian
summer which often prolongs the warm
season far into autumn.

It was the first day that all four campers
stayed in the shack, which the trapper and
the Indian had during the preceding week
transformed into a real cozy cabin. Chunks
of ash, elm, maple, and cottonwood slowly
burning in the old sheet-iron stove which
Barker had set up in the middle of the room
kept the cabin dry and warm, while the large
spattering drops of rain beat a tattoo on the
roof.

The few stray leaves that had until now
adhered to their branches were swept away.
The river-bottom trees assumed their sharp,
undraped silhouettes of winter, and from the
bluffs all the bright autumn colors had vanished.

The summer birds had gone. Only a few
hardy chickadees, woodpeckers, and nuthatches
that defy even the coldest northern
winter had remained behind the migrating
hosts.

By the middle of November the lake was
frozen over.

With the beginning of cold weather little
Tim’s health rapidly improved. Soon he was
strong enough to go sliding on the ice; and
when Barker had a blacksmith at the landing
make a pair of skates for each of the boys
the joy of the lads was unbounded.

They skimmed lightly over the frozen
sloughs, where the trees and banks sheltered
them from the wind. From these trips they
returned with flushed cheeks and ravenous
appetites and many stories of what they had
seen.

They had chased pickerel and other fish
under the clear ice, they had seen a muskrat
swim along with an air bubble attached to his
nose, and they had watched clams slowly
plowing their furrow in the sand as they
withdrew from the shallower banks into deep
water.

The Mississippi and its tributaries harbor
a large variety of clams whose shells are
now used for pearl buttons. The boys were
curious about the habits and life of these
quiet creatures that were always nearly
buried in mud and sand and moved about by
queer little jerks. When Tim was still too
weak to move about much, he had amused
himself for hours dropping clams, which Bill
had caught, back into the water, and watching
how each shell, slowly opening, put out a sort
of white, fleshy foot; slowly righted itself,
and crawled away into deep water.

“What do clams eat and how do they
spawn?” the boys wanted to know, but on
these questions neither trapper nor Indian
had any information.

Clams do indeed lead a strange life. They
cannot run after their food, so they just open
their shells a bit to allow the water to run
through, in order to catch any small particles
of food the water may contain.

The young clams just hatched are so small
that the naked eye can scarcely see them.
They have no shell at all and swim about very
actively. As soon as possible they attach
themselves to the gills of several kinds of fish.
The fish do not like it, but they have no way
of escaping from the very minute creatures.
Embedded in the gills of fish the young clams
live for some weeks looking like small pimples.
When they have grown a tiny shell
they drop to the bottom of the river or lake
and begin to live in the usual way of clams.
That is the curious life-history of the river
clam.

While the skating lasted the boys were
well occupied. The camp was run on the
plan of two meals a day. Barker and the
Indian set a few traps for muskrats and
minks, tidied up the cabin, cooked the meals,
washed dishes, and cut wood. In all these
occupations the lads gladly took a hand. At
times they went the round of the traps with
the men. When the weather was fine they
went on skating trips up and down the glassy
ice of the sloughs, which reflected like a mirror
the boys at play and the trees on shore.

One who has skated only on artificial rinks
and ponds does not know the thrill of traveling
on a smooth winding river or on the
transparent expanse of a frozen lake.

Tim tired very easily, but he grew visibly
stronger every day. His fever had entirely
disappeared.

Their Cousin Hicks, the boys seemed to
have forgotten, at least they never spoke of
him. They were happy and content in the
care of their two friends.

The trapper, on the other hand, had become
so attached to the lads that he once remarked
to Tatanka: “I don’t see how I can
ever tear myself away from these lads. It
would be hard for me to give them up to their
parents, but if that man Hicks ever shows
up to claim them, I tell you I’ll fight him to a
finish.”

“Where do you think, my friend, that bad
white man has gone?” Tatanka asked.

The old trapper thought a moment. He
had often asked himself the same question.
“Down-river,” he replied then. “He will
inquire about us of steamboat men and hotel
men. And he is likely to go clear down to
Vicksburg. He has some evil design on the
lads, but I’ll be hanged if I can figure out
what it is. I can only think that for some
reason he wants to keep them away from
Vicksburg.

“He lost our trail at St. Paul or he would
have been upon us long ago. I was on the
lookout for him every day until we saw him
go down-river lately. For the present we are
rid of him, but he has some very strong reason
for wanting possession of those boys, and
I think we’ll fall in with him somewhere after
we start south.”

About the Indian war in Minnesota, the
boys and their friends were well informed.
Barker and the Indian had in no way exaggerated
the danger. The enraged Sioux had
killed about eight hundred white people, and
if the trapper and Tatanka had not taken the
boys away, the lads would surely have lost
their lives. At the beginning of winter, the
Indian war was over. The whole Sioux tribe
had been driven from the State of Minnesota.
A good many Indians had been captured by
General Sibley and all white captives had
been released.

It was much more difficult for Barker and
the boys to get a clear idea about the war on
the Mississippi River near Vicksburg. They
had received no letters from Vicksburg since
they had camped at the foot of Lake Pepin,
and all they really knew was that Grant was
trying to take Vicksburg.

The city of Vicksburg lies under a high bluff
on the east bank of the Mississippi. By December,
1862, the Confederates had lost control
of the Mississippi River, except for a
stretch of two hundred miles between
Vicksburg and Port Hudson, both of which
points they had strongly fortified. By holding
this stretch of the great river, they
controlled the mouth of the Red River and
could secure large supplies and thousands of
men from Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.

The lowlands of the Mississippi at Vicksburg
are about forty miles wide, and many
streams and bayous wind this way and that
way through vast marshes and forests.

In December, 1862, Grant tried to attack
Vicksburg from the north by way of the Mississippi
Central Railway, but the bold Confederate
cavalry commander, Van Dorn, destroyed
all his supplies at Holly Springs, and
Grant was compelled to give up this plan.

After this plan had failed, Grant tried several
others, his object being to secure possession
of the wooded hills directly east of
Vicksburg. For the present he was baffled by
the geographical character of the country,
which was excellently suited for defense by
resolute men who knew every channel, but
which presented almost insuperable obstacles
to an invading army.

CHAPTER XIII—FISHING THROUGH THE ICE
====================================

As is usually the case in Minnesota, the
fine outdoor skating came to a close toward
the end of November through storms and
snow-falls.

If the lads had not lived in company with
such men as the trapper and Tatanka, time
would have hung heavily on their hands. On
many days the weather was very cold and the
snow had become so deep in the woods that
traveling was very difficult.

After they had been shut up in the cabin
for three days by a bad storm, Tatanka one
morning began to carve something out of a
piece of soft basswood.

“What are you making?” Tim asked.

“Watch and see,” said Tatanka, as he continued
slowly to cut away small white shavings.

Soon the boys saw that Tatanka was making
a wooden fish about six inches long.
When the figure was ready, the Indian cut
small pieces of tin out of a tobacco-can and
these he tacked to his wooden minnow to
serve as fins.

“There, my little brothers,” he uttered
with a smile, “you have a good minnow. He
will fool the pickerel and the bass when they
are hungry. I put a little piece of lead on
him and you pull him up and down in the
water, and pickerel and bass think he is a real
fish. They come to eat him. May be you
catch them.”

After Tatanka had made two more wooden
minnows he and the lads went to a deep quiet
place in a slough to fish.

At first they cut a small hole in the ice.
Then, by the aid of a few poles and some
blankets, Tatanka built a small dark tent over
the hole.

“Now, then,” he said, “we go in and fish.
May be we catch them, may be not. If the
fish don’t come, we go home. May be they
come to-morrow.”

The tent was entirely dark, but the boys
were surprised to find that after their eyes
had adjusted themselves to the darkness in
the tent the water did not appear dark, but
was pervaded by a soft light, enabling them
to see clearly even insects and small fish
which swam past, and they could plainly see
their decoy minnow to a depth of four feet.

Tatanka took the string of the decoy in his
left hand. In his right hand he held a spear,
and the three fishermen seated themselves on
a log.

“You sit still,” Tatanka told them.
“Don’t jump. Fish have no ears, but they
can feel every little noise in the water.”

It seemed a long time to the boys before
anything happened. Then Tatanka bent over
quickly, thrust his spear into the hole and
brought up a large flapping pickerel.

“May be we caught him,” he spoke with a
laugh. “Now, Bill, you catch him. This is
the way Indians catch plenty fish in winter
when they cannot find deer.”

Again Bill waited a long time. At last he
saw some big fish. With a beating heart he
dropped his spear and would have lost it, if it
had not been tied by a string to his arm, but
he caught no fish.

Tatanka laughed. “You get much
excited,” he said, “like white man. Keep cool
like Indian. May be you catch him next
time.”

The next time Bill showed that he could
keep cool, and he brought up a fine large
bass. The fish were getting more numerous
and Bill added another and another to his
catch. Sometimes several fish or even a
small school of them came together. Very
soon Bill could tell when a school was coming,
because their bodies shut out a part of
the light before they reached the hole and
made the water look dark, as if a cloud were
passing over.

After Bill had fished a while, Tim also
learned to fish like an Indian and brought up
several fine fish.

“Now we go home,” Tatanka suggested,
after a while. “I think Tim is hungry.”

That night each man ate for supper a big
bass, which Barker had fried in bacon fat and
corn meal.

After this day, the boys often went fishing
by themselves and supplied the camp with
all the fresh fish the four men cared to eat.
They found that all the fish, bass and pike,
pickerel and suckers, tasted remarkably good,
for all fish are good if they have been caught
in cold, clear water.

One warm morning, the genial old trapper
took down the gill-net.

“You lads come with me,” he said. “I can
catch more fish in a day than you and Tatanka
can catch in a week. Yesterday you
fished all day and caught one little sunfish.”

“No, Mr. Barker, it was a big one,” Tim
piped out.

“It was only a poor sunfish,” Barker replied.
“We’ll starve if I don’t help you
catch fish. Take both axes and our shovel.”

When they arrived at the spot Barker had
selected, he stepped off a line and told the
boys to shovel the snow from half a dozen
spots, while he and Tatanka began to cut
holes through the ice. The first hole he cut
about eight feet long and then he cut smaller
holes about ten feet apart, but all in a straight
line.

When the holes were cut, he asked the boys
to shovel the slush out of them as much as
possible, while he went and cut a long straight
pole.

“I know, I know how he is going to do it,”
Tim exclaimed. “But we’ll have to make all
the holes longer, so they will run together.”

“You wait,” said Bill. “I won’t cut any
more holes.”

When the long pole was ready, Barker tied
one end of the net to it and pushed pole and
net into the first long hole and under the ice
toward the second hole.

To the other end of the net a rope was attached.

“There,” he told Bill, “you take hold of
this rope and see that the net does not get
tangled.”

When Bill had taken charge of his end of
the net, the trapper pushed the pole under the
ice to the next hole and in the same manner
he pushed and pulled it along to the last opening.
Here he pulled the pole out and drove
the end of it into the soft bottom.

“Now, Bill,” he suggested, “you had better
tie your rope to a log, so they can’t run
away with your end of the net. You know
there are some big fish in the Mississippi.”

As the men had nothing to do for a while,
they sat down under a warm sunny bank,
where Barker built a fire, under the dry
stump of a stranded cottonwood.

“White man’s fire,” Tatanka muttered
good-naturedly, as he backed away from the
growing heat.

“Yes, white man’s fire is what we want to-day,”
the trapper replied. “The Great River
furnishes us plenty of big wood, but the little
dry sticks are buried under the snow.”

Then to the delight of the boys the trapper
drew a small tin pail out of his pack-sack, together
with some cornbread and a big piece of
bacon for each one.

“There, lads,” he said, “you warm the
cornbread and fry the bacon while I make
tea.”

It took some time before enough snow was
melted for tea, for even on a big fire snow and
ice melt very slowly.

“I forgot to dip water out of one of our
net-holes,” the trapper remarked, “but we
have plenty of time to melt snow and ice.”

The boys cut some green maple twigs, and
on these as an improvised grate they heated
the bread and fried the bacon.

“I’m glad you brought something to eat,
Mr. Barker,” Tim remarked thankfully. “I
was getting very hungry. You called us so
early this morning.”

“I did,” replied Barker, “because the fish
run most during the warm part of the day.”

“Do they know when the air is warm!”
asked Bill. “How can they know down in
the water?”

“Can’t tell, lads,” Barker smiled. “You
lads ask a lot of hard questions. I reckon
they can tell whether it is storming or
whether the sun is shining.”

After the meal, Tatanka smoked in silence,
with a far-away look on his face.

“What is it our brother is thinking of?”
Barker asked him in Sioux. “His face is sad
and his eyes heavy.”

“I was thinking of my people,” Tatanka
replied, after a few moments of silence.
“Not long ago they lived on this great river.
Now they are driven away from their river,
Minnesota, where deer used to be plentiful,
and where elk, ducks, and geese live still in
great flocks, and the muskrats build many
little houses.

“But my people will never come back.
They must now live in the country of short
grass and small trees on the River Missouri.
A few more years they will hunt buffaloes,
but the white people are fast killing all the
buffaloes and making robes out of their skins.

“When the buffalo are gone, we shall starve
or become beggars, or we must learn to live
like white men.

“A spirit tells me I ought to return to my
people.”

“You cannot return now,” Barker told him
in Sioux. “We need you. If the bad white
men find us, they may steal the boys and kill
me, if you leave us. You must stay with us
and go with us to the city, where the white
people have the big war.”

“I shall stay with you,” Tatanka promised,
after a pause, “but I’m homesick for my people.”

A flock of chickadees had been attracted by
the smoke and the fire. They hopped boldly
on the ground and picked up the crumbs of
bread, and one even took a bath in a little pool
of snow-water collected under the bank by the
combined beat of the fire and the sun.

“The little birds bring good luck,”
remarked Tatanka. “May be the big guns will
not kill us, when we go south,” he added
pensively.

When the fishermen approached their net,
they saw by the movement of the poles that
they had made a good catch. The net was
fairly alive with pickerel, pike, bass, and
suckers, but they caught no gars or paddle-fish.

“Why don’t we catch some of those queer
fish?” Bill asked.

“Don’t know,” replied the trapper. “You
never see those in winter. May be they go
south to live in warmer water.”

In the evening, the men dressed all the fish
they had caught. They did not smoke them
as they had done with the fish caught in warm
weather, but they placed them on frames of
sticks in a brush shed. This shed was their
store-house. The brush protected the frozen
fish from thawing in the sun, and in this way
the men kept a good supply of fresh fish always
on hand.




CHAPTER XIV—SIGNS OF SPRING
===========================


Winter held on obstinately until the middle
of March.

At last, one fine morning, Tatanka announced,
“I smell spring. The little nuthatches
and the little woodpeckers are calling
and I saw two crows flying north. That
means spring is coming and the ice will soon
float down stream in big white blocks.”

The boys found another sign of spring.
The flowing of the sap. Tatanka called it the
bleeding of the trees. At the time when the
frost is not yet out of the ground, when
spring has not quite conquered winter, soft
maple, box-elder, birch, and sugar-maple begin
to bleed; that is, the sap begins to drip
out of some fresh wound. A squirrel may
have cut the bark, a bird picked a bud, snow or
wind or the falling of dead branches may
have bruised the bark or torn away some
twigs. It is from these wounds that the sap
begins to drip.

Sharp eyes can find these drippings in the
forest, and it is easy to discover small dark
patches of sap on city streets and walks.

“Mr. Barker,” the boys asked, “can’t we
make some sugar and syrup?”

“Go ahead with it, laddies,” the old trapper encouraged them. “A can of maple
syrup and some real maple sugar would taste
good to me.”

The boys had grown up in a country where
the sugar-maple, a northern tree, does not
grow and had only the vaguest idea about
sugar-making; so they asked Tatanka to show
them how to make maple-sugar, a bit of woodcraft
which white men have learned from the
Indians.

Each boy took a tin pail and Tatanka took
two big pails and an ax. Tim soon found a
large box-elder and Bill sighted a big soft-maple,
a river-bottom maple, from which the
sap was dripping. But Tatanka laughed at
them saying, “No good, no good; ’most all
water. Good sugar trees grow on high land.”

Tatanka knew the trees in winter as well as
in summer, and when the three sugar-makers
had reached the Minnesota bluffs he soon
found two big sugar-maples. Into each tree
he made an upward cut and put a chip into
the cut. The sap began at once to run along
the chips and dripped into the pails below.
In an hour the small pails were filled and
Tatanka replaced them with his large
buckets.

“Now you build a fire and boil your sap,”
he told the boys. “Slow, over Indian fire;
no white man’s fire.”

The boys were surprised to see how much
of the sap boiled away before they had a
thick sweet syrup. Tatanka from time to
time poured some more sap into their pails
so that each boy at last had a pailful of maple-syrup.

About noon the boys were hungry, but Tatanka
would not hear of going to camp for
lunch.

“When you make sugar, you make sugar
all day. You drink sap, you eat syrup, and
sugar. That is the way the Indians make
sugar, plenty good sugar. We go home when
it gets cold, then the sap stops flowing.”

They did stay all day, and the lads helped
Tatanka boil his sap down to a good thick
syrup.

In the evening Mr. Barker’s biscuits and
Tatanka’s maple syrup made the best supper
the lads had ever eaten. After the meal, Tatanka
made some real maple-sugar by boiling
down the syrup in a big frying-pan, but
little Tim fell asleep before the syrup began
to sugar and Bill was disappointed because
he could eat only a few small pieces, although
Barker and Tatanka told him that he might
eat the whole panful if he cared for it.

“It’s the same as with the honey,” Bill
mourned. “I thought I could eat a piece as
big as Mr. Barker’s fist, and then I could only
eat a spoonful.”

A week later, about the first of April, the
ice below Lake Pepin began to move.

There is something mysterious in the
spring break-up of a big river. A warm,
south wind begins to melt the snow. So rapidly
it vanishes from open fields and from
south-facing bluffs that you wonder where it
went. But in the woods the white covering
lingers for weeks. After several days of
warm weather, the unbroken ice on the river
is covered with a few inches of water, but
there are no signs of a break-up. Still the
slush and water on the ice is the sign that the
sleeping river is awaking.

Over night the creeks have become swollen,
their turbid floods rush into the river,
whose icy covering although still two or three
feet thick has lost the brittleness and strength
of winter. The creeks and brooks and countless
bubbling, gurgling rills creep under the
ice. With a slow, but resistless power, the
power of a hydraulic press, they lift the frozen
mass from its moorings on shore. The
sleeping river yawns and stretches itself;
the ice begins to move, slowly at first, then
rapidly. The river is awake, alive once more.
In a day or two, the great rafts and masses
of ice have passed south, the river is open; it
is spring.

“Friends, it is time to move,” Barker observed next morning. “In a day or two our
camp will be flooded.”

Within a few hours everything was packed.
Barker and Tatanka each handled a paddle,
Bill took his seat in the stern to steer, while
little Tim, wrapped in an Indian blanket,
watched for hidden snags from his seat in the
bow. Meetcha, who had come out of his log
about two weeks before, was allowed to
remain with his four-footed friends in the
woods. Tim had become convinced that they
could not take him along any farther.

When evening came, they had left the long
lake far behind them and now carried their
large canoe up on high land at the mouth of
a spring brook several miles below the quiet
little river town of Minneiska, White Water.

There was no time to set up a tent. The
travelers raked together a bed of dry leaves,
spread their blankets over them, rolled themselves
into other blankets, and used their
tent-canvas as extra covering.

“Boys, make a night-cap out of your handkerchiefs,”
Barker advised the lads, “for the
morning will be biting crisp.”

While they were eating breakfast next
morning, they saw a flock of cranes, real
cranes, not the common blue herons of our
marshes, rise from a sandbar. With a spiraling
noisy flight, they arose against the
face of the high bluff and disappeared over
the timber, six hundred feet above the river.

“Where are they going?” asked Tim.
“Why don’t they fly north up the river!”

“They have gone to feed on the young winter-wheat
of the settlers on the upland,” the
trapper informed them, his eyes kindling with
the fire of the pioneer hunter. “If you are
willing to climb the high bluffs we may be
able to find them.”

Tatanka, like a real Indian, was willing,
and the boys, like all real boys, were eager to
go.

“Each man take a blanket,” ordered Barker,
as he put a day’s rations into his pack-sack,
and in addition to his gun he also took
an ax.

“What’s that for!” asked Bill, with his
usual curiosity.

“To chop their heads off,” Tim spurted.
“Bill, you ask lots of fool questions.”

The men laughed aloud. “One string to
this crane hunt,” the old trapper told them.
“The fellow that asks one of those ’tarnal
botheration questions hikes back to the river
and watches the boat till the rest of us come
back.

“Keep your eyes and ears open, but your
mouths shut tight. That’s the rule for a
crane-hunt. Now walk slow. Those hills
are higher than they look.”

For a little while they traveled up the ravine
of one of those small streams which run
in large numbers into the west banks of the
Mississippi. On the upper river, from St.
Paul into Iowa, the hills and bluffs on the
west bank are densely wooded, while those of
the east bank are covered with a scrubby
growth and show many patches covered only
with grasses and other prairie plants, which
are fitted to endure intense sunlight, great
heat and long spells of drought. Some
patches of prairie, however, are also found
amongst the bluffs on the west bank.

It was on one of those bare patches of hillside
that the lads, with great joy, picked their
first spring flowers, the wild crocus, or pasque
flower, of the Prairie States.

From Illinois to Montana, and northward
far into Canada, the wild crocuses spring out
of the sear grass or the burnt prairie, while
ice and snow still linger in shaded spots.
Like millions of living amethysts, scattered
broadcast over a continent, but far more beautiful
than dead stones, they smile at the sky
and the sun before the drought and hot winds
of summer can wither their petals, and before
rank grasses and weeds can cut off the sunlight.

When the robins have come back and the
crocuses are out, the boys and girls of the
Prairie States and Provinces know that
spring has come.

The prairie crocuses do not take time, like
most other flowers to grow leaves first. The
brown woolly buds push out of the soil as
soon as the snow is gone. After a few warm
days they cover the bare patches of dry river
bluffs and all the stony ridges and moraine
hills, which the great glaciers left behind
many thousand years ago. They make early
flower-gardens along the right-of-way of the
railroads, although the section men burn the
grass and the prairie flowers every fall.
Fires cannot harm the sleeping roots and
buds of the crocuses in the ground.

When the prairie grasses begin to grow
in May and June, the crocuses find time to
produce large whorls of pretty cut-up leaves,
and the winds of summer scatter their long
seeds.

They are not really the first flowers of the
Northern States; that honor belongs to the
dark purple spathe-like sheaths of the skunk-cabbage,
which grow in the black muck near
brooks and spring-holes, under the tasseled
alders and red killikinnick. But it takes a
sharp-eyed naturalist to find these strange
underground flowers.

Many different trees the lads also discovered
in these upland woods. There were the
trees of the large fragrant buds, shellbark
and pig-nut hickory, black-walnut, and butternut;
and from the dead rustling leaves the
lads picked many a well-seasoned nut, which
the squirrels, gray and red, had lost or forgotten.
There were several kinds of oaks,
bur-oaks, black oaks and white oaks; and from
the dark oaks the trunks of canoe-birches
stood out in pure white. In the river bottom
the lads had often cut for their evening
camp-fires the slender trunks of the river
birch with its tousled curls of light brown
bark, but of this curious birch they did not
find a tree in the upland woods.

After the four men had followed the little
stream for half a mile, they struck off to
their right up a steep slope; where they often
became entangled in vines of wild grape and
bitter-sweet. Tim was soon out of breath
and had to rest.

“Mr. Barker,” asked Bill, “did you say
the bluffs were six hundred feet high! They
must surely be a mile high.”

“Keep still,” Tim urged him; “you’ll have
to go back to the boat.”

After much hard climbing, they came to a
wide ridge, which sloped gently upward toward
the river and they followed it in that
direction. The ridge was covered with great
spreading white oaks two or three hundred
years old. Bold gray squirrels were chasing
one another along the big horizontal boughs.
A woodchuck that had been feeding on a
patch of new grass sat up to look at the invaders
of his solitude and then hurried into
his hole. From a distance came the strange
drumming of a grouse, while a woodpecker
sounded his peculiar rattle on a dead branch.

At the edge of the woods, they came to a
bare spot, which ended abruptly on the top
of a hundred-foot cliff.

“Don’t go too near the rim,” Barker
warned the boys, as they ran ahead. “If you
go over, you’ll get smashed on the rocks below.

“Here we’re going to camp for the night,”
the trapper said, as he and Tatanka placed
their packs on the ground.

“When are we going to hunt cranes?” Bill
almost blurted out, but he checked himself
just in time.

“It wouldn’t be any fun to sit alone all
night at the boat,” he whispered to Tim,
“with the rest of you camping on the grandest
spot I have ever seen. I think Mr.
Barker has some fun up his sleeve, but I
can’t figure out what it is.”




CHAPTER XV—AT INSPIRATION POINT
===============================


“I can’t look over, I get dizzy!” Tim said
to Bill. “Look at the river. It surely looks
a mile below.”

“Lie down,” Bill told him. “Then you
can’t tumble off.”

The boys amused themselves by dropping
stones over the cliff and counting the seconds
till they struck amongst the trees below. Tim
claimed he could throw a stone into the river.

“Ah! you can’t do it, Tim,” Bill objected.
“The river is a quarter of a mile away as the
crow flies.”

“I’ll pick a good sailer-rock,” Tim persisted,
“and you’ll see.”

But although Tim did his best, his rock
seemed to come sailing back to the sloping
bluff.

“Guess you are right,” admitted Tim, a
little crestfallen; “the rivet is pretty far
away.”

Tatanka stood gazing in silence over the
sublime panorama. The river appeared to
come like a broad glassy channel out of the
blue hazy distance in the north. Just below
the point it was half a mile wide and Tatanka
could easily distinguish the deep dark channel
from the light brown sandbars near shore.

Like a wonderful picture the valley spread
out below the hunters. Dark groves of elms
stood out clearly from long stretches of cottonwood
in light gray. The swelling and
bursting buds of the bottom maples showed
great dashes of a dark ruddy red, while vast
stretches of gray and brown marshes were
dotted with brighter patches of orange willow
and of bright red killikinnick.

“My people once lived here,” said Tatanka,
at last. “They loved this land. It is rich
and beautiful, and at that time many red deer
and elk and black bear lived in these woods.
The big game is gone now. The white settlers
have too many guns and too many dogs.
They drive the deer away.

“It is good that Manitou gave wings to the
ducks and the geese, so the white hunters can
not kill them all.

“Our people will never come back to this
land. Our trails will grow over with weeds,
and the graves of our fathers will be forgotten.
Our people must learn to plow the
field and raise cattle and horses like white
men!”

The old trapper also was carried back to
his boyhood as he stood gazing over the river,
the bayous, and islands, and to the hills two
miles away on the Wisconsin side.

“I used to think,” he said to his friend,
“that the Wabash and the Illinois were great
rivers, but they are just little crawling creeks
compared with the Mississippi, and they can
show no great woods and grand hills and
cliffs like the Mississippi. If these woods
were mine, I would build my house on this
point and every morning I would see the sun
rise over the hills yonder. In the winter I
would watch the snow-storms rush down the
valley; and in the sultry summer nights I
would watch the lightning play between the
hills, over the river and among the tree-tops,
and hear the thunder roll and echo from bluff
to bluff.”

“Are you not afraid of thunder and
lightning?” asked Tatanka. “My people are
afraid of it and will not travel in a storm.”

“I used to be afraid, when I was a boy,”
Barker continued, “but since that time I
have lived so much alone in the forest and on
the rivers that I no longer fear a thunderstorm;
but I never make my camp near tall
trees.”

White people who go down the Mississippi
in boats do see some fine scenery, but the real
grandeur of Mississippi River scenery is revealed
only from good vantage-points on the
crest of the bluffs. For those sufficiently
strong and Venturesome to climb to those
points, nature spreads out her grandest panoramas
found in the inhabited part of the
globe.

Many Americans have made long trips to
see the beauties of the Rhine and the Danube;
the far grander beauty of the Mississippi is
to our own people still an unexplored country.
There are awaiting those who would
go and see a thousand Inspiration Points on
the upper Mississippi and ten thousand miles
of semi-tropical wilderness, cane-brake, forest,
lakes, and bayous on the lower river and
its southern tributaries. Most Americans
know the Mississippi only as a crooked black
line on the map.

When Barker and Tatanka had finished
drinking in the landscape, as they called it,
the trapper told the lads that they might run
about as they pleased till four o’clock.

“At that time,” he added, “the hunting
will begin.”

“What are we going—?” Bill started, but
he checked himself just in time, to the great
delight of Barker and Tatanka.

“Come on, Tim,” he sang out, “Let’s take
a hike to the prairie. I’ll be sent home, if
I hang around here all day.”

“Don’t chase any geese or cranes, boys,”
Barker called after them. “If you see any
on the fields, don’t disturb them.”

The boys discovered that from the place,
where they started, the open prairie was only
about half a mile away. As they carefully
skirted along the edge of the timber, they saw
several large flocks of geese and cranes feeding
on open fields of young winter-wheat. On
one field they could distinguish a boy who had
evidently been told to drive the cranes off the
wheat-field. He was a small boy and was having
a sorry time of it. He had no gun, but
tried to scare them away with a stick.

“I bet his mother wouldn’t let him take a
gun,” remarked Tim.

“May be his people are too poor to buy a
gun,” suggested Bill. “Settlers in a new
country don’t have much money and they need
all kinds of things for a new farm.”

The boy walked from one end of the field
to the other. When he arrived at the east
end, the cranes flew to the west end, but the
boy could not make them leave the field.

The longer the boy tried to drive them
away, the bolder they became.

“I’ll bet they know the boy hasn’t a gun,”
Tim exclaimed.

Now a very big crane defied the boy altogether.
He walked boldly toward the boy,
spreading his wings and uttering a loud
croak.

“Look, look,” exclaimed Tim, “he’s going
to bite the boy. Let’s run and help him.”

“No, we mustn’t,” argued Bill. “Mr.
Barker said we shouldn’t scare the cranes.
If that kid runs away from a crane, he deserves
to be bitten.”

“I would run,” Tim acknowledged, “if I
had no gun.”

The boy was now actually running away
with the crane after him, but falling over a
furrow and seeing that he could not run away
from the fighting crane, he picked up his stick
and went hard at his pursuer. At this unexpected
attack, the crane ran away, napped his
wings and arose to join the flock at the other
end of the field.

The boy started for home, looking back
from time to time as if afraid that the big bird
might be after him again.

“I wouldn’t herd cranes,” said Tim, “if
they didn’t give me a gun.”

The boys returned to camp in good time
and about four o’clock the hunting actually
began, for the big Canada geese began to fly
over the timber to their resting place on a
long sandspit below Inspiration Point.

“One rule,” Mr. Barker called, “about this
hunt. Don’t fire at any bird that is too far
off. We don’t want to leave any wounded
birds in the woods. Tim, you come with me.
I’ll tell you when to fire.”

The hunters walked back half a dozen rods,
so they would not drop any birds below the
cliff, and placed themselves about fifty yards
apart on a line parallel to the crest of the
bluff.

Half a dozen geese soon came flying just
above the tops of the old oaks.

“Aim at the last one,” Barker told Tim.
“Take it from behind!”

Tim brought down a large fat goose.

“Good work!” exclaimed the trapper.
“Your shot went right in between the feathers.
If you had fired at the bird from in
front, the shot might have glanced off the
heavy coat of feathers. ‘Always aim at a
single bird,’ is also a good rule in wing-shooting.
If you just fire wildly at the whole flock,
you are likely to miss them all.”

Barker at once took up Tim’s goose, saying,
“That will just furnish us a good supper
with some bacon and corn bread.”

After the goose had been picked and drawn,
he put a slender green pole through it, which
he laid on two forked sticks close to a hot
fire. When one side was partly cooked, he
turned the other side to the fire. In this
way he prepared a savory meal of wild goose
roasted on the spit.

When it grew too dark to shoot, the hunters
came in with six geese. Bill had had the bad
luck of merely winging a bird, so that he was
compelled to follow his game for nearly an
hour. A wild goose is so protectively colored
that among dead leaves and brush it can make
itself almost as invisible as a sparrow.

When Bill finally captured his bird, it was
almost dark and he had forgotten to watch the
direction to camp; he was lost.

He fired two shots in quick succession.

“There is Big Boy,” Tatanka laughed.
“He is lost, Tim; shoot twice, so he can find
home. He is hungry.”

Two shots fired close together means, “I’m
lost,” to hunters and woodsmen.

Of course Bill was not far from camp and
he came home in time for supper.

“Bill,” his younger brother teased him,
“the next time you run after a goose, hang a
cowbell on your neck, so we can tell where
you go.”

Barker and the Indian had built a lean-to
and a warm camp-fire with back-logs of green
oaks. For the fire itself they had cut a big
pile of green white-birch.

“Look here, boys,” Barker told them after
supper, “we sleep between the log-fire and
the lean-to. Any man that wakes up puts a
few logs on the fire. In that way I think
we’ll keep warm.”

They sat late around the camp-fire and
when, at last, they were ready to roll in,
Tatanka walked out to the point, below which
river and valley spread out in a strange light.

“Look, my friend,” he called. “The whole
sky is burning. It is growing daylight. The
world is burning up.”

As they stepped away from the fire, they all
saw the strange appearance of the sky. It
was indeed growing daylight, although it was
still before midnight.

Great streamers and bundles of whitish and
reddish light were shooting up from all points
on the horizon toward the zenith. Some
streamers flickered, swayed and died out, but
others took their places and for half an hour
it was light enough to read. The river, the
bottom forest, even the Wisconsin bluffs could
be plainly seen. The men could even see their
canoe amongst the willows below.

“The world is coming to an end,” Tatanka
muttered, overcome by his superstitious
fears.

“No, it isn’t,” Barker explained to him.
“We are seeing a grand display of northern
lights, the greatest I have ever seen, although
I have seen them many, many times. This is
something many city people never see, because
they are always cooped up in houses.”

In an hour it was dark again, and the tired
hunters rolled up in their blankets before
the fire.

“Make a night-cap out of your handkerchiefs,”
Barker advised the boys. “The
night is going to be chilly and your heads and
ears will get cold if they are not covered.”

Early in the morning they started for the
field, where the boy had herded the cranes.
The birds were there again, and it was not
hard to get within range, although they were
much more wary of the hunters than they had
been of the small boy with his stick. When
the great birds arose, all four fired and each
man brought down his bird.

As Bill ran to pick up his game, the trapper
called to him, “Look out, Bill; he isn’t
dead!”

But Bill was too eager to take warning.
The bird suddenly straightened out his long
neck and shot his sharp beak right into Bill’s
face.

The young hunter staggered and cried out
with pain and surprise. The crane had cut
a deep gash in Bill’s cheek and the blood ran
freely down his face.

At first his three friends laughed at him, but
when they saw how badly Bill was wounded,
Tatanka quickly chewed a handful of choke-cherry
twigs and put them on the wound to
stop the bleeding.

Thus ended the crane-hunt near Inspiration
Point.




CHAPTER XVI—SMELLING THE STORM
==============================


Inspiration point was the first camp at
which the lads had enjoyed the magnificent
panoramic view of the great river and its
valley and where they had tasted the joy of
roaming about freely through upland forests
and fields.

Some camps one finds so attractive that it is
hard to break away, and after one has at last
rolled up tents and blankets, memory involuntarily
returns to the scene.

The lads enjoyed the camp at Inspiration
Point so much that they begged Mr. Barker
to stay there at least another night.

“I don’t know, boys,” the old man objected
mildly. “It may not be so pleasant to-night.
I think we are going to have rain.”

“Where can the rain come from?” the boys
questioned. “There isn’t a cloud in the
sky.”

“Not yet,” the old trapper admitted, “but
clouds will come soon enough. I sort of feel
and smell rain in the air.”

The boys laughed, “Ah, you’re just fooling
us,” they insisted. “You can’t smell rain like
you smell flowers or skunks.”

They ran over to Tatanka who, leaning
against an old oak, was gazing down the
valley where a large, high, rocky island arose
like a flat-topped mountain.

“I climbed to an eagle’s nest on that mountain
when I was a boy,” he told the lads.
“The eagle was the totem of our village. I
brought down a big young eagle and the other
boys and I caught fish for him and he grew
very tame. When he grew older and could
fly well he flew away, but he often came back
and sat on our tepee poles.”

“Tatanka,” the boys questioned, “is it going
to rain to-night? Mr. Barker says he can
feel and smell rain. Do you believe he can
smell rain?”

Tatanka smiled and gazed into the hazy
distance. “Yes, I think it will rain,” he answered,
“after a while.”

“Can you smell it?” the lads asked eagerly.

“May be I can smell it, may be I can feel
it. White trappers and Indians can smell
many things other people can’t smell.”

“We can smell deer and buffalo and porcupines.
I can smell the river now.”

“Yes, I think it will rain to-night. And
may be there will be thunder and lightning.”

The boys ran back to the trapper.

“Mr. Barker,” they argued, “our lean-to
will shed the rain if we pile on some oak
brush with the leaves still on it.”

“That lean-to,” the old man laughed, “will
leak like a sieve. In five minutes the wind
will shake your ears full of big cold drops,
and you wouldn’t sleep a wink all night.

“You fellows can stay here overnight, but
I reckon Tatanka and I will go down to the
boat and set up our tent. I don’t care to
sit up all night in the rain. I have done that
often enough.”

But after a little more coaxing, the old
man consented to stay another night on the
point.

“Now I tell you what you can do,” he
suggested to his young friends. “You
gather a lot of bark, big pieces, of oak or
basswood, anything you can find, and we’ll
put a roof on our shed.”

“But the bark doesn’t peel yet,” Tim objected.

“No, no, I don’t mean green bark. Get
big pieces of bark from the old dead trees.
That will do well enough for one night.”

The boys soon had a stock of dead bark
piled up.

“Looks as if you were going to start a
tannery,” remarked the trapper.

“Now go and find a lot of strings so we can
tie it on.”

“Where can we find strings!” the boys
wanted to know.

“You go and ask Tatanka. He can find
them.”

Tatanka was not troubled about finding
strings. Some he made by shaving the bark
off young shoots of basswood. Others he
found by twisting the fiber of dead Indian
hemp and wild nettle into strong cords.

“The woods are full of good ropes,” he
murmured, “but white men don’t know how
to find them and make them. They can
only buy them in the stores.”

The boys were going to tie the bark crosswise;
but the trapper would not have it that
way.

“Tie them running up and down,” he said.
“Alternate them with rough side up and
smooth side up, so they overlap, making a lot
of little troughs running to the ground.
Then tie them to three strong poles fastened
crosswise over the lean-to.

“There! It is a rough-looking shelter.
Not nearly so neat as a Chippewa bark-house,
but it ought to shed the rain if the wind
doesn’t blow it over and if the wind doesn’t
come from the wrong side.

“Now get some wood, boys. Tim, you
gather a lot of dry sticks for our cooking fire.
Bill, you cut some green birches for the camp-fire.
Tatanka and I will cut some green oaks
for back logs.”

“Mr. Barker, why can’t I gather dry
branches for the camp-fire? There are
plenty of them lying around,” Tim asked
eagerly.

“You may, Tim,” the old man replied
good-naturedly, “but you will have to sit up
all night to feed the fire.”

“Mr. Barker,” Bill asked, “isn’t oak just
as good as birch for our camp-fire. I have
to carry the birch a long way.”

“No, Bill. Oak is no good when you can
get birch. Green oak alone burns too slow.
Dry oak is too hard to cut and burns too fast.
Hickory and tamarack crackle and throw
sparks into your blanket, so you wake up with
your bed on fire.

“Birch is best for an all-night fire. It
burns not too fast and not too slow, and it
never shoots sparks into your bed.”

Tim soon had enough sticks and dead
branches to last several days, so he helped
Bill to carry the billets of birch to the fireplace.
They were almost five feet long and
about six inches in diameter.

“They will burn pretty slow, I fear,” the
trapper remarked, “because the sap is in full
flow and the wood feels soggy. Birch is most
sappy at this time of the year.”

The night started well enough. It was
warm and clear and the campers sat around
the fire after supper and saw the stars come
out, a few bright ones first and then the host
of smaller ones and very small ones. From
their high camp the boys could see the larger
stars reflected in the river like faint streaks
of trembling light. The river continued to
rise and the bottom began to appear like a
series of long winding lakes separated by
long islands of dark forests. The lads
gazed in wonder from the river to the sky
and from the sky to the river. The Great
Dipper stood out clearly.

“When does it rise and when does it set?”
Tim asked.

“It is always there,” Tatanka answered.
“It never rises and never sets, but the sun
puts it out in the morning.”

The boys looked questioningly at the trapper.
“That is true,” he confirmed Tatanka’s
answer, “all the stars near the Polar
Star never rise and never set. You can see
them in the evening as soon as it is dark
enough, and they shine till the rising sun
makes them invisible. They just go round
and round the Polar Star.”

Many faint chirping sounds were heard
as the four campers sat near the camp-fire.
The green birch burnt very slowly so that
Tim had to put some of his dry sticks between
the logs to keep a good steady fire. At all
other times green birch starts quite readily
from a small fire of dry sticks and then burns
with an even glow. The ends sizzle with
escaping moisture but the wood does not
crackle and does not throw off any sparks.

The boys wanted Tatanka to tell them what
the Indians knew and believed about the
stars and the moon, but the trapper urged
them all to go to bed.

“Tatanka,” he said, “can tell you about
the moon and stars some other time. We
must make an early start to-morrow. If we
keep on loafing among the hills, as we have
been doing, we shall not get to Vicksburg all
summer.

“How far do you think it is to Vicksburg?”
he asked the boys.

They did not know.

“I talked to Ryerson at the store,” Barker
continued. “He is an old river man. He
told me it was five hundred miles from Lake
Pepin to St. Louis and a thousand miles from
St. Louis to Vicksburg. It will take us two
months to get there, if we average twenty-five
miles a day.”

“We can go faster than that, Mr. Barker,”
the boys protested; “we can make fifty miles
a day.”

“You boys do big talking,” the trapper
laughed at them. “We want to rest on Sundays.
It is going to rain some days, and on
some days the wind is going to be strong
against us. Then we shall sometimes make
only short trips in order to stop at good
camping-places, and sometimes we shall stop
to fish.”

All four were soon fast asleep.

About midnight the boys woke up. A glaring
flash of lightning followed by a loud
crashing and echoing thunder made them sit
up startled.

“There,” Barker remarked with a friendly
laugh, “what did Tatanka and I tell you?
Bill, crawl out and put some more sticks and
green billets on the fire or the rain will put
it out.”

Soon the rain came down pattering on the
bark roof and the four campers had to sit
hunched up under their shed.

“How did you know, Mr. Barker,” Tim
asked, “that the rain would come from the
west?”

“I did not know it,” the trapper acknowledged;
“but I know from experience that
most of the showers in this region come from
the west, so I faced our shelter to the east.”

The lads sat in awed silence as the lightning
played back and forth between the Minnesota
and Wisconsin bluffs and lit up the
river and the woods as with great flashlights,
and the thunder rolled and rumbled and
echoed from east to west and from the high
island to the south.

The lean-to shed the water perfectly, for
the trapper had seen to it that the rough bark
shingles overlapped well and that all pieces
with knot-holes were rejected.

When the violent lightning and thunder
had passed eastward, the lads ran out and
took a shower-bath in the rain and it was not
long before all four were again sound asleep
under their warm blankets in front of the
slowly burning fire.




CHAPTER XVII—SOUTHWARD AT LAST
==============================


When the lads arose next morning, their
eyes gazed with joy and wonder on the valley
below, tinted with the rosy light of an
ideal morning of early spring. The river
was no longer a big stream held by well-defined
banks.

“Look, Bill,” Tim exclaimed, with wondering
eyes. “Lake Pepin has run over.
All the woods are under water.”

The river was indeed almost two miles
wide, overflowing in the forests, covering
marshes and meadows, from bluff to bluff.
Like a fiery red ball, the sun came creeping
over the eastern bluffs, and a soft red tint
was reflected from the great flood below the
camp.

The campers found their canoe on high
land where Barker had turned it over, but the
flood had almost crept up to it.

In a very short time the travelers were
off.

“Keep your eyes peeled for snags and
driftwood,” the trapper cautioned Bill.
“We have only one canoe and cannot afford
a wreck and a spill.”

“You can depend on me,” Bill replied.
“The water is much too cold for swimming.
I want to stay in the canoe.”

Tatanka and Barker plied their paddles
vigorously and Tim did his share, with a
short light paddle.

At noon they made only a short stop for a
cup of hot tea and a very light lunch, wishing
to go as far as possible before camping.

About three in the afternoon, the trapper
told the boys to look out for a good camping-place.

“We want to stop at a good spring,” he
said; “this river water isn’t so bad, but good
spring water is much better.”

“How can we find a spring!” the boys
wanted to know. “We don’t know the country.”

“If you are wise campers you can always
find a spring,” the old man instructed them.
“Look for places where the high bluffs come
down close to the water edge.”

Within an hour a high bluff came into view
a mile down the stream, and the lads, who
were getting both hungry and tired, expected
to find a good camp-site. In this hope they
were disappointed. The current surged
along past the tree-trunks where rafts of
driftwood and rubbish had collected, while
masses of dirty white foam were held by the
dead wood and rubbish. The place did not
look in the least inviting, and the boys looked
in vain for a clear bubbling spring.

“Where are the springs, Mr. Barker?”
Tim asked timidly.

“Well, my boy,” the old man replied, “I
reckon they are covered by the flood.”

“What shall we do for a camping-place?”
Bill asked.

“Go on until we find one that suits us.”

“But if we don’t find one?”

“Then we camp at a place that does not
suit us,” the trapper replied dryly. “Traveling
down-river isn’t like living in town.
We’ll just take things as they come.”

About five o’clock they came to a place
where a small creek came in from the west.

“Bill, you had better steer into this bay,”
the trapper suggested. “We’ll camp there
for the night.”

“It isn’t a good place, Mr. Barker,” Tim
ventured to say. “Look at all the dirty driftwood
and the willow-bushes. We are getting
into a swamp where there can’t be any
springs.”

The trapper smiled. “May be,” he said
to Tim, “we’ll find a good place and perhaps
a spring, too. Everybody go slow now.
Look out for snags, Bill, and let us land near
the foot of that big ash.”

Within a few minutes all heavy packs were
taken out of the canoe and the craft itself was
turned over in a dry spot high above the
water.

There was not only one spring, there were
several coming out of the hillside and running
into the small flooded creek.

“I knew we would find good water up this
creek,” the trapper told the boys.

“How could you tell!” the lads wondered.
“Have you ever been here?”

“No, I have never seen this place before,
but I have seen many groves of black-ash
and they only grow in cold, springy ravines.
Wherever you see the slim gray trunks and
the short spreading branches of black-ash you
can find springs. Sometimes the flow is
small and you have to dig out a little pool for
your well, but good cool water always seeps
and flows around the roots of the black-ash.”

Like every good leader, Barker had each
man assigned to some special camp duty.

He himself was cook and baker. The Indian
set up the tent and made the bed. Bill
brought water and cut wood for the camp-fire,
while Tim gathered dry brush and sticks
for the cooking-fire and set out the dishes,
which consisted of a tin cup and plate, knife,
fork, and spoon for each man.

“We don’t need the tent,” Barker said to
Tatanka. “It is not going to rain to-night
and the miserable mosquitoes haven’t come
yet. Just make a good bed on plenty of dry
leaves and grass. The boys are very tired
and we are all a little bit soft after our
rather lazy winter.”

“What are we going to do if it rains?”
Tim asked.

“Pull the canvas over our heads,” the old
man answered with a serious face, “and if it
rains hard, we’ll get wet. But it isn’t going
to rain.”

The lads wondered how he could know, but
they asked no more questions.

In half an hour the trapper called out,
“Supper! All hands fall to.”

And they all fell to, for all were ravenously
hungry, and bacon, corn-bread, and roast
goose hurriedly vanished in large quantities.
The goose had been roasted the day before
and had just been heated on a spit.

After supper Tatanka and Bill arranged
the packs under the canoe while Barker and
Tim washed the dishes, for the trapper insisted
that it is just as easy to keep clean in
camp as to live with a lot of dirt.

The place of their camp was a few miles
below the town of Winona. They had, however,
not landed there for several reasons.
They felt that they had no time to lose if
they would reach Vicksburg before the end
of summer, and before Grant could take the
Confederate stronghold of the Mississippi.
They had no recent letters from Vicksburg,
and on their trip they could of course receive
none. Barker and the lads had written to the
boys’ parents that they might expect them
in Vicksburg sometime in June or July.
“That is,” the letter closed, “if at that time,
we can get in.”

“If Grant has made up his mind to take
Vicksburg,” the trapper had told the boys,
“I reckon he’ll stick around and fight till he
gets it. No matter how big and how many
the swamps are that protect it. If he cannot
get at the city from the north, he will get at it
from the south. If he cannot keep a base of
supplies in his rear, he’ll do without a base
and will make his army live on the country,
till he can establish a base.”

Another important reason for their not
stopping at many towns was that they felt
that Hicks was certainly trying to discover
their whereabouts.

“The bad man is surely looking for us,”
Tatanka declared. “He has hired scouts to
let him know when we pass. We must not
stop at the towns.”

On the following evening they passed the
Iowa State line and they were now traveling
between the States of Wisconsin and Iowa.

The scenery all along had been wonderfully
grand. It showed the same high
wooded bluffs and steep bare rocks they had
so much admired at their camp on Inspiration
Point.

This grand striking scenery continues some
hundred miles into Iowa.

A large region in southern Minnesota,
southern Wisconsin, and northern Iowa has
never been glaciated and is known as the
driftless area. In this region the great river
and its tributaries have cut deep valleys
through layers of limestone, dolomite, and
sandstone. The sides of the valleys have
never been rounded off by creeping glaciers,
and the cliffs of dolomite stand up straight
and bold like the well-known Maiden Rock
and Sugar Loaf near Winona.

This stretch of the Mississippi from St.
Paul and Minneapolis to Dubuque, some four
hundred miles long, is the greatest scenic
river highway in the world. Every American
should travel over it before he goes to
see the rivers of Europe, most of which are
insignificant streams compared with the
Mississippi. The whole navigable distance on
the Rhine is no greater than the great scenic
course of the Mississippi, and this course is
less than one-fifth of the whole navigable
length of our great American river. He who
has not traveled on the Mississippi has not
seen America.

Even several great tributaries of the Mississippi,
like the Missouri and the Ohio and
the Red River, are larger than any river in
Europe.

The boys soon learned to find good camping-places,
and vied with each other in selecting
the best ones.

As far as they could, they camped a few
miles above the larger river towns. The
supplies they needed they bought of farmers
or in small towns, two men generally going
after the supplies and the other two staying
at the camp. Many interesting incidents occurred
to them all, but it would make our
story too long to tell of them.

The river now became alive with all kinds
of steamboats, some carrying passengers and
merchandise, others guns, ammunition, and
soldiers, and it often taxed Bill’s skill to avoid
danger from the swell of the big boats.

Spring was advancing apace. When they
reached the northern boundary of Missouri,
about the first of May, it was summer. The
trees were green, birds were in full song, and
the woods were full of flowers.

Spring advances up the river at the rate of
something like fifteen miles a day. About
the first of March poplars and hazel hang out
their pollen-laden catkins at St. Louis; while
at the Twin Cities, the first spring flowers appear
about a month later, but as the party
was rapidly traveling southward, the season
to them advanced three or four days in
twenty-four hours.

At the well-known river port of Hannibal,
Missouri, they placed their canoe and baggage
on a steamer and took passage for Cairo
at the mouth of the Ohio. At the great busy
port of St. Louis they kept quiet on the boat.
The next evening they landed at Cairo.

Below Cairo, the mighty stream grows to
its full grandeur. It has received its two
greatest tributaries, the Missouri and the
Ohio, besides such streams as the Wisconsin,
the Des Moines, the Iowa, and the Illinois,
all of them fine rivers for the canoeist, the
fisherman, and the sight-seer.

Cairo was the most northerly point, where
the great struggle for the possession of the
Mississippi began between North and South.

The four travelers had now reached the
scene of the Civil War on the Mississippi.




CHAPTER XVIII—IN THE SUNKEN LANDS
=================================


It was a mellow summer evening about the
first of June, when the party arrived at the
small town of Hickman in Kentucky.

Ever since they had left the upper river,
their birch-bark canoe had been an object of
curiosity to all who had seen it, because the
white-birch or canoe-birch does not grow on
the lower river.

At Hickman, the four travelers went into a
store to replenish their supplies. In front
of the store, sitting on a cracker-box, a man
greeted Barker with, “Hello, Sam! Where
on earth do you come from? Haven’t seen
you since you were trapping coons and hunting
wild turkeys on the Wabash.”

“And what brings you into this little river
burg, Dick Banks?” the trapper asked,
equally surprised.

“Oh, I just drifted down the Wabash and
the Ohio to this old river. You know I always
wanted to see the Mississippi, when we
were boys. Well, I’m working on a steamboat
between New Madrid and St. Louis.”

After a while Banks took Barker aside.

“Say, Sam,” he spoke in a low voice, “it
seems sort of strange, but I reckon there was
a fellow here looking for you just this morning.
He asked whether we ones had seen a
white man with an Indian and two boys traveling
down river?

“Hadn’t the faintest idea you could be the
man he referred to. You hadn’t any beard
and gray hair when I saw you last, but sure
as I’m Dick Banks, his story fits your party
exactly. Fellow seemed to be mighty set on
finding you. Told us you had kidnapped his
two nephews and stolen two horses of him
’way up in Minnesota. Said he was going to
swear out a warrant and have you arrested.”

“That dirty pup,” exclaimed Barker, with
his eyes flashing. “My Indian and I saved
those lads from being murdered by the Sioux.
The lads rode away on our own horses and
we didn’t even take a blanket of the dirty
bootlegger. The old squint-eyed scoundrel
deserted the lads. Dern his soul! I always
believed he wanted them to get killed. He
doesn’t want them to get back home for some
reason. My Indian and I are going to take
them home to Vicksburg. I knew Hicks in
Indiana. He always was a blackguard.”

Dick Banks puffed vigorously at his corncob
pipe.

“Sam,” he replied, “I’ll tell you something.
You used to be some scrapper back in
Indiana. I figure you could handle that
friend of yours all right, but you might as
well go back with me to St. Louis. You can’t
get into Vicksburg.”

“And why can’t I get in?”

“You haven’t seen as much of the war as
I have seen. I have been clear down to
Haynes Bluff a little way above Vicksburg.
Grant and his men have got the place bottled
up. You can’t get in. Gunboats, big ones,
little ones, the whole river is full of them.
Guards and soldiers everywhere. Don’t try
it, Sam. They might think you were a spy
and hang you. Those army courts aren’t as
good-natured as our old Indiana juries.”

“No, Dick,” the trapper argued. “I can’t
go back with you. I’m going to take those
boys home. I’ll either fight Hicks or give
him the slip. We’re going to Vicksburg.
May be I can get a pass through the lines.”

“All right then, Sam; I’ve said my say.
Get a pass? Why, man, Abe Lincoln himself
couldn’t get a pass! You’re as set on having
your way as you were as a kid.

“Now don’t hurry that Vicksburg campaign
of yours. Better paddle about in the
swamps and bayous for a few weeks. They
say in about a month the town will have to
surrender. You can’t get a pass into Vicksburg.
They’ve been shut up two weeks now.”

That evening the four travelers had a good
supper on board of Dick Bank’s boat and
Dick also fixed beds for them on board the
steamer, and at daylight before the town
was awake, they paddled their light craft into
a small winding channel which led into one of
the most mysterious lakes of North America,
Reelfoot Lake, a lake made by the great earthquake
of 1811, generally known as the earthquake
of New Madrid.

Tatanka was especially happy to be on this
small winding stream.

“It is like the winding Minnesota River,”
he said, “and it is beautiful like the small
rivers that join the Mississippi above Lake
Pepin. For a long time they follow their own
winding trail in the bottom woods, as if they
were afraid to go near the great Mississippi
in which all big and little rivers lose themselves.”

“The trees are different here,” Bill remarked.
“We never saw any cypress on the
Minnesota.”

They spent nearly all day on this winding
channel, and it was not until an hour before
sunset that they came in sight of the strange
waters and scene of Reelfoot Lake.

“I will not go there,” said Tatanka, when,
at last, the Lake of the Sunken Lands spread
out before them. “It is a spook lake, a lake
of bad spirits. We must not camp on it.
My brother, you told me that a bad spirit
shook the earth and trampled down the farms
to make the lake.

“Look, the water is very black and very
many dead trees grow out of it.”

“Tatanka,” exclaimed Barker, “you are
forgetting what the missionaries have taught
you. Haven’t they told you many times that
there are no spook lakes, no bad medicine
lakes? Those dead trees didn’t grow dead.
They died, when the water rose around them.
There are no bad spirits in the earth. The
earth just shook and sank. You have been
a scout for the white soldiers, and you have
to forget your Dakotah superstitions.”

Tatanka was silent a while, and stopped
paddling.

“The missionaries,” he admitted, “are
our friends and I believe they tell us the
truth. They do not want our land and they
do not cheat us as some of the traders do.
They say our beliefs in spook lakes and bad
medicine are superstition, but it is hard to
forget our beliefs, because our fathers have
taught them to us for many generations.

“My father once took me along on a buffalo
hunt far west and he showed me a spook
lake. The hunters camped on the shore of
the lake, but none of them would have been
brave enough to paddle a canoe on its waters.
Some of them would not even gather the dead
wood on its shore, but my father told us boys
to gather the wood and we did. Our women
used the wood to smoke and dry the buffalo
meat, and we boys watched for the bad spirits
to fly out of the wood.

“I did not see the spirits, but some of the
boys told me that they heard the spirits whistle
and howl and rise with the smoke after the
sun had gone down, and they said that Katinka,
the medicine man, saw them, too.”

“Where is that spook lake?” the boys
asked, also forgetting to paddle.

“That spook lake,” Tatanka continued,
“lies far west on the plains, which the white
men call Dakotah. No trees grow on the
plains, but trees and bushes grow on the lake
shore and many dead trees and stumps grow
in the water. Our people call it the Lake of
the Stumps. The water was so bitter that
we could not drink it, but our horses
drank it.”

Bill and Tim dipped a handful of the brown
water from Reelfoot Lake.

“It isn’t bitter,” both exclaimed at once.
“This isn’t a spook lake.”

“Did your horses die, after they drank
out of Stump Lake?”

“No, they liked the water.”

“Then it wasn’t a haunted lake,” both of
them argued.

“But why did the trees die?” Tatanka objected.

“May be the outlet became choked and the
trees were drowned,” Barker explained.
“You know that white trappers always catch
plenty of mink and muskrats and find good
fish in the lakes which the Indians say are
haunted.”

Tatanka began to paddle again, but looked
as if he were not convinced but had given up
arguing against all three of his friends.

The scene spread out before them looked
indeed weird and almost forbidding. A dead
forest of tall straight cypress spires arose
like tree specters from the dark waters of the
lake. The gray trunks had long ago been
stripped of bark and branches; a few bald
eagles and fish-hawks sailed in spirals over
the dead pointed poles and uttered a shrill,
piercing cry at the intruders of their solitude.

“It is a forest of ghost trees,” Tatanka
murmured. “We should not stay here.”

.. figure:: images/illus-190.jpg
   :figclass: illustration
   :align: center
   :alt: “It is a forest of ghost trees,” Tatanka murmured.

   “It is a forest of ghost trees,” Tatanka murmured.

“Ghost trees nothing,” the old trapper
exploded impatiently. “Those trees were
drowned forty years ago. The bark and
branches have rotted away. It is a wonder
the trees are still standing.

“Tatanka, you’re a hopeless old heathen.
If you don’t quit scaring the boys with your
spook lakes and ghost trees, I’m going to
send you home on a gunboat, and I’ll hire a
coal-black negro to help us paddle the canoe.
Here, fill your red calumet pipe and don’t be
afraid of harmless dead trees.”

A row of turtles plunged into the water
from a log, a pair of ducks arose out of some
rushes and a large fish jumped out of the
water and fell back with a loud splash. Then
the channel wound about amongst white
water-lilies and patches of the large, beautiful
wild lotus or wankapin lilies.

Tatanka had lit his pipe and looked about
him in silence.

“There,” Barker encouraged him.
“Doesn’t that look like a Minnesota lake?
Ducks and turtles and fish and acres of water-lilies.
Just like the marshes on your wonderful
Minnesota, only the lotus doesn’t grow
there.”

“Yes it does,” Tatanka claimed. “My
mother and I gathered the big seeds on a
lake below the mouth of the Minnesota and
in a few other places where wankapin grows
in our country.”

“Well, at last you are convinced that we
are not on a bewitched lake. But now it is
high time we look for a camping-place.

“Bill, steer straight for shore. We’ll
make a good soft bed in that cane-brake.”

There are two kinds of cane growing in the
South, the small and the large. The small
cane, in which the travelers were camping
now, grows about a dozen feet high and forms
vast thickets on waste lands as far north as
Kentucky. These cane-brakes were the home
of deer and bear and other wild animals, but
large areas have now been made into cotton-fields.

The big cane grows only on wet lands near
the rivers from the White River southward.
It reaches a height of thirty feet. At the
age of about thirty or forty years, the big
cane flowers and produces an abundance of
rich nourishing grains for stock and game.
After flowering, the old canes die and new
plants spring up from the seed. The young
shoots are known as mutton cane, because
deer and bear and stock grow fat on them.

“This cane,” said Tatanka, after they had
eaten their supper, “is like the pipe-stem
reeds of the Sioux Country. The Indian
boys called them spear-grass, and we threw
the reeds at each other when we played
war.”

The campers remained a week on Reelfoot
Lake, and they still found much evidence of
the great earthquake half a century before.

The great cracks in the earth, formed at
that time, could still be seen in many places.
Some of the fissures were filled with sand,
which had come up from below; in others,
young trees had grown up, while many of the
old trees, still alive, were leaning over the
partly filled fissures.

It was a strange lake indeed on which the
travelers found themselves. Most of the
lake, about ten miles long and two miles wide,
was covered with water-lilies, lotus, and many
other kinds of water plants. Along the margin
and on half a dozen low islands grew the
sombre cypress, its odd, fantastic, knee-like
roots projecting above the water. On the
higher lands also, many trees not growing
on the upper river had appeared. Sycamores,
or buttonwood, mulberry, gum-trees,
and catalpas.

The campers met an old man, who had
lived near Reelfoot all his life and who told
many stories of the great earthquake.

“I was born the year of the earthquake,”
the old man related, “and my father told me
many stories about it.

“The first shock came a little after midnight
on December 16th. My father and two
other men were on the river at the time.
They were going to New Madrid and were
going to start very early, so they could return
the same day. Their boat was tied
near a very big sycamore. All at once they
heard a great thundering underground. The
big tree began to sway like the tow-head
willows in the storm. Then the whole bank
broke loose and crashed into the river. First
the water in the river seemed to rise like a
big wall, the next moment it rushed down
stream with a roaring current.

“My father was thrown out of the boat
and would have drowned if he had not gotten
hold of the branches of the big sycamore.
How he did it, he did not remember. He
yelled for help, and after a long time the
men came back with the boat and took him off.

“They were all so scared they couldn’t
talk; they thought the world was coming to
an end.

“They hurried to the highest land they
could find to spend the night, but none of
them expected to see the sun rise. Again and
again the earth rolled and shook as if it were
a blanket. Big trees crashed and snapped
like bean-poles, and whole acres of forest
crashed into the river. The air smelled of
burning sulphur, or some such gases as come
out of a sulphur spring.

“Father and the two men crept into a
thicket of small brush because they were
afraid to stay in the big timber, and father
always claimed that in a few minutes it grew
as dark as if they had been sitting in a cellar
at night.

“Every little while, a dozen times or more,
they felt the earth shaking and heard the
deep rambling underground and the roaring
and rushing of the river.

“When daylight came they hurried home
and when they found that father’s family had
not been injured they decided to go on to
New Madrid, thinking that they might be of
some help to sufferers or to shipwrecked
boatmen.

“They hardly recognized the river. It
was full of landslides, trees, and all kinds of
debris, and one good-sized island and its tow-head
had entirely disappeared. They found
the town of New Madrid in ruins. The land
had sunk ten feet or more. About thirty
boats in the harbor had been wrecked or carried
down stream.. One large barge loaded
with five hundred barrels of flour was split
from stern to bow and left high and dry on
the bank.

“The people had all fled and were camping
on high land away from the river.”

The old man paused as if for breath.

“Did the people ever go back?” asked Tim.

“No, they didn’t. The fact is they
couldn’t. The river washed the whole town
away. The present town is built a little
farther up the river.

“The whole country, my father said, was
changed by the earthquake. Many good
farms sank and many others were covered
with sand. Where the lake is now, Bayou de
Chien and Reelfoot Creek used to run
through a dense forest of cypress trees. You
can follow their channels in your bark boat,
because there are no stumps or dead trees in
the old channels.

“Some of our neighbors were so frightened
that they moved away. Father was also going
to leave. He was going into Arkansas,
but mother would not move. She said she
had traveled in an ox-wagon from Pennsylvania
to Indiana and from Indiana to Tennessee
and that was enough. If the end of
the world was coming, Arkansas wouldn’t
last any longer than Tennessee.”

Thus ran the story of the old farmer of
Reelfoot Lake. He spoke in a quaint Southern
dialect, in which Bill and Tim were quite
at home, but which compelled Barker to pay
very close attention, while Tatanka lost most
of the tale.

The story of the old pioneer has been corroborated
by the testimony of many reliable
men.

At the time of this great catastrophe, Captain
Nicholas Roosevelt was taking the pioneer
steamer *New Orleans* from Pittsburgh
to New Orleans. The steamer was on the
Ohio when the earthquake occurred, but when
the boat reached the Mississippi, the pilot
became much alarmed and said he was lost.
The shores had changed and large islands
had disappeared.

The naturalist, Audubon, felt the earthquake
in Kentucky and wrote an account of
it in his journal.

The shocks were most severe over a distance
of about one hundred miles from Cairo
to Memphis and over a width of about fifty
miles. They were felt at St. Louis and New
Orleans, Detroit, Washington, and Boston.
They were undoubtedly felt as far up the
great river as St. Paul and Minneapolis, but
that region was at the time still an unsettled
Indian country.

Although the earthquake was one of the
most severe in the United States, few lives
were lost. The country around New Madrid
was at that time thinly settled and most of
the houses were small and built of wood. It
is, however, not surprising that many settlers
left the country, for the shocks continued
from time to time until the early part
of May, 1812.




CHAPTER XIX—PAST ISLAND NUMBER TEN
==================================


Below Cairo the mighty river becomes still
mightier and winds with countless curves
and bends this way and that way through
rich lowlands from ten to forty miles wide.
On a stretch of three hundred and fifty miles,
twice as far by river, only three large cities,
Cairo, Memphis and Vicksburg, offer large
and convenient ports. Very often the great
river does not touch the high land for a hundred
miles or more, but glides along through
endless marshes and through forests of oak,
elm, sycamore, walnut, gum, cypress, and
other Southern trees, while numberless bayous,
tributaries, and oxbow lakes give variety
to the vast flood-plain of swamp and forest.
Where the land is high or protected by dikes,
rich plantations have been cleared, but many
hundreds of square miles are subject to overflow
and remain wild to this day.

When the travelers reached Hickman again
they met once more their friend, Dick Banks.

“We just ran up to Cairo,” he told them.
“Now we are going south to bring up a load
of wounded soldiers. Old Grant is fighting
the Johnnies as hard as he knows how. The
Johnnies say he can’t take Vicksburg, but I
reckon he will. He’s got them in a trap and
he’ll starve them out, if he can’t drive them
out.”

“Have you seen Hicks again?” Barker
asked.

“Never a hair of him, Sam. I reckon he’s
gone down to Haynes Bluff or some place
near Vicksburg, where he expects you-uns
will show up. The scoundrel never got a
smell of your presence in this river burg.

“When you pass Island No. 10, look out
for sunken boats. The Southerners had a
big fort there. And you had better go past
New Madrid after dark. The town is full of
soldiers and the river full of boats. The
commander is a pretty cranky sort. He
might ask you for papers and if you haven’t
got them, he might put you in the pen. You
know you’re a suspicious looking outfit with
your Indian and birch-bark dugout.”

“Great Heavens, Dick, do you call that a
dugout!” exclaimed Barker. “It’s a canoe.
Haven’t you ever seen one before! No dugout
for me. We can portage this ship wherever
we wish to go.”

“You needn’t worry about portages, Sam.
The river is high all the way to Vicksburg.
Just see you don’t get lost in those endless
swamps and forests.

“You don’t have to go by way of Island
No. 10. You can go by way of Bissell’s
Channel and Wilson’s Bayou, and cut off
about six miles. The channel may be dry
now, but you say you can carry that bark
tub of your’n.”

“Dick,” Barker replied, laughing, “if you
ever again call our canoe a dugout or a tub,
I’ll swat you one. See if I don’t!”

“Tatanka, and I made it ourselves and it is
the best and safest birch-bark afloat on all
this river.”

“May be she is pretty steady,” Banks took
up his banter again, “but she is not much of
a snagboat, and a mighty poor ram. Better
let me stow you all away on the *Grey Hawk*
and take you safely down to Haynes Bluff,
that is as far as we are going. From there
you can walk to Vicksburg, if the Boys in
Blue will let you, but I know they won’t.”

“No, Dick, thank you for your kind offer.
The boys want to see Island No. 10, and
I want to see it myself, but we may meet you
at New Madrid.”

“All right, Sam. If you are not afraid to
show your outfit at New Madrid. We’ll be
there day after to-morrow.”

Tatanka, although he saw and heard everything
about the earthquake and the sunken
lands with close attention, was happy when
Barker had said:

“Let’s get back to Hickman and the Old
Mississippi. I reckon Hicks has lost our
trail by this time, if he really ever found it.

“Boys,” he continued, “I must tell you
something now. That Cousin Hicks of yours
is a bad case. There may be a fight if we
ever run across him. If there is, you keep
out of it. Tatanka and I will handle him.

“Never mind,” he cut the boys short when
they wanted to know more, “I tell you he is a
bad egg. Now you know enough. I ran
across him long ago in Indiana.”

“He is a skunk,” Tatanka grunted, with
an angry face and with eyes flashing. “If
we catch him, we shall throw him into the
river like a worthless cur.

“I am glad we shall go away,” he continued.
“I never was afraid to fight our
enemies, the Chippewas, but I am afraid of
spook lakes, of earthquakes, and of big guns.
All Indians are afraid of them.”

The Mississippi River contains a very
large number of islands. Below the larger
islands often lie long low bars grown over
with small willows, and these brush-covered
bars are known as tow-heads.

Between Cairo and New Orleans, the Mississippi
River Commission has numbered
about one hundred and thirty islands, while
many large ones have names. From time to
time old islands disappear and new ones are
made, when the river washes out a short cut
across a bend.

The travelers found Bissell’s Channel
about half-way between Island No. 8 and
Island No. 9, as Captain Banks had told them.
But it was not a channel at all; as the boys
had expected. It was a road of stumps about
two miles long, and the boys wondered how it
was made and what it was for.

The four travelers arrived on Island No.
10 in good time, for the distance was only
twenty-five miles down stream from Hickman.

They made their camp inside the deserted
Confederate works and they looked with awe
upon the big portholes in the logs through
which the cannons had swept the river.

“How did the Union soldiers take the
island!” the boys asked.

“I don’t know,” Barker told them. “I
think two of their gunboats ran past the guns
of the island on a very dark night. You had
better ask Captain Banks about it.

“I reckon we’ll go to Vicksburg on the
*Grey Hawk*. It will take us all summer to
paddle the five hundred miles the way the
river runs. You see, if we get there after
Vicksburg falls, your people may not be there
any more and we might not be able to find
them. So I think we had better go with
Captain Banks.”

Next morning early they carried their
canoe out from under the big sycamore and
cottonwoods on Island No. 10 and started
north on a big bend of the river.

At noon they reached New Madrid, at that
time a lively, hustling town, as Captain Banks
had told them.

The *Grey Hawk* had already arrived and
as Captain Banks vouched for his four
friends, the commander was willing to let
them go along to Vicksburg.

After supper, as they all sat on deck chatting
with the captain, the lads begged the old
river captain to tell them about Bissell’s
Channel and about the fight at Island No. 10.

“That channel,” the captain began, “was
cut by the Engineer Regiment of the West,
and it was a great piece of work. It was
done more than a year ago in March and
April, 1862.

“You see, the Confederates held a strong
fort with big guns on Island No. 10, and they
had also planted guns on the left bank of the
river above and below New Madrid, but we
held New Madrid.

“Colonel Bissell’s men built large rafts for
men to work on, for the water was very high
at the time. At first they cut the trees about
eight feet above the water. Then they
rigged a frame and a long saw to the stump
and four men, two at each end, pulled the
saw and cut the stump about four feet and a
half under water.

“The small trees were easy, but we had
an awful time with some of the big elms that
grow a kind of braces near the ground. On
some of those we worked two hours, but Captain
Tweedale, who was saw-boss, always figured
out what was wrong when the saws began
to pinch.”

“What did you want the channel for!”
asked Bill, not a little puzzled by the whole
strange plan.

“Well, General Pope,” the captain explained,
“wanted gunboats and transports to
attack Island No. 10 and cut off the Confederates
below the island, but Commander
Foote of the river fleet did not think that his
boats could run the island. So Colonel Bissell
was ordered to dig a canal above the
island and thus cut off the bend of Island
No. 10 on which you came. If that could be
done we could place guns, boats, and men and
transports above and below Island No. 10,
and the Confederates would have to get out.

“We did some great work. We had four
steamboats, six coal-barges and four cannons.
You see, we were ready to fight as well as
work. Besides the Engineer Regiment, we
had about 600 fighting men ready for battle.

“But things moved faster than we expected.
On the night of April 4th Commander
Henry Walke of the *Carondelet* ran
the guns of Island No. 10.

“It was a very dark night and a storm was
passing over the river. The *Carondelet* had
been protected in vulnerable parts with coils
of hawsers and chains, and a coal barge,
loaded with hay, had been lashed to its port
side.

“The pipes for the exhaust steam had been
led into the wheel-house at the stern, so the
puffing of the steam could not be heard.

“About ten o’clock, Commander Walke
gave the order to cast off. By the time the
*Carondelet* came opposite the Confederate
shore batteries, the flashes of lightning were
so vivid that the boat was discovered and the
roar of the batteries and the crack and
scream of the balls soon mixed with the roar
of thunder. But during the pitch-dark moments,
between flashes of lightning and in the
rain, the Confederate gunners had not time
and could not see to aim their guns. They
had to fire almost at random.

“So close ran the *Carondelet* to the island
that the men on board could hear an officer
shout, ‘Elevate your guns.’

“Away the *Carondelet* steamed down the
black river. No lights on board, except the
roaring fire under her boilers, which twice
set the soot in her smokestack on fire. She
raced past the shore batteries, past the formidable
island batteries, past the floating
battery below the island. Dozens of cannon-balls
were fired at her. One struck the coal-barge
and one was found in a bale of hay.

“About midnight, Commander Walke arrived
at New Madrid with every man on
board safe. What hundreds of men had believed
impossible, he and his volunteers had
done.

“On the 7th of April, Commander Thompson,
of the *Pittsburgh*, also ran the island in
safety.

“About the same time we finished our
channel and ran boats through it to New Madrid.”

“But, Captain Banks,” the lads asked eagerly,
“what happened to the men on Island
No. 10?”

“Well, you see,” the captain explained,
“they were cut off and had to surrender.
Only a few of them got away in dugouts and
boats through the swamps on the Tennessee
shore.”

“Why didn’t they all march away into
Tennessee!” Tim asked.

“Boys, they couldn’t,” Barker explained
to them. “Only a little way east of Island
No. 10 lies Reelfoot Lake, so they couldn’t
march away in that direction. They held
the island just as long as they could.”

“Time to go to bed for you lads,” the captain
took the word again. “I have told you
all I know about Bissell’s Channel and the
fight at Island No. 10.”

The lads were soon fast asleep in their
cabin, dreaming of Spook Lake, of monster
battle-ships, and of their home in Vicksburg.

The men continued talking for some time,
Captain Banks telling his friends about the
dramatic river battle of Memphis on June
6, 1862.

“Captain, I want to ask you one thing,”
Barker said. “Why can’t the Union gun-boats
do any good fighting down-stream, why
do they have to do all their heavy fighting
headed up-stream?”

“Because,” explained the captain
promptly, “they are just a pick-up lot of
boats, all, I think, stern-wheelers. Only their
bow is protected with plates and railroad-iron.
Their engines are weak, and if
maneuvered down-stream they will drag their
anchors in the muddy bottom and are hard
to control. They are real fighting-ships only
when they point their noses up-stream.”

When at last Barker invited Tatanka into
a cabin, the Indian smiled. “No,” he said,
“Indian cannot sleep in a box. I sleep in my
blankets outside, with plenty of air around
me.”




CHAPTER XX—ON TO VICKSBURG
==========================


The steamer *Grey Hawk* cast off from the
New Madrid landing at dawn of day.

The years just preceding the Civil War
and the years of the war were the great days
of steamboating on the Mississippi and its
tributaries.

Hundreds of boats, large and small, ran on
the main stream, on the Ohio, the Missouri,
the Illinois, the Minnesota and other rivers of
the great Mississippi basin. The average
life time of a Mississippi steamer was only
five years, because countless snags, ice, fires,
and other dangers were the bad medicine to
navigation on all the streams. None of them
were improved, none had any system of lights
or signs; the pilots had to know the rivers,
whose currents and sandbars and snags were
constantly shifting. But the business was
so profitable that the trips of one season often
paid for the boat. Settlers were rushing into
the western country and they and all their
goods went by steamboat, for no railroads
had yet crossed the Mississippi. On the turbulent
Missouri the steamers ran to the mouth
of the Yellowstone and beyond, taking up
settlers, soldiers, general freight and goods
for the Indian trade, and bringing back loads
of buffalo-skins and other fur from the Rocky
Mountain country. On the Minnesota small
steamers ran two hundred miles beyond St.
Paul into the newly opened Sioux country
to market the first wheat of the new settlers.
A few small boats plied on the upper Mississippi
above St. Paul and Minneapolis, where
the lumber industry and flour-mills were just
developing.

The Civil War proved a fatal blow to river
traffic. Both the Federal and the Confederate
government commandeered a large number
of vessels for war purposes, and many of
those were wrecked and sunk or burnt in battle.

Immediately after the war, railroads began
to parallel the Mississippi and its navigable
tributaries. The steamboat traffic
lingered for a number of years, but it never
again attained its former glory, and soon
sank into its present insignificance.

Moreover, the great movement of traffic in
North America is east and west, while the
trend of our great navigable river system is
north and south.

Barker and Tatanka, as well as the boys,
found life on a Mississippi steamer very attractive.

The broad main channel and bayous,
sloughs and oxbow lakes; the high bluffs and
the lowland forests, had all in turn lured
them on to much hard traveling and many interesting
side-trips. But just now they all
felt that they had had enough of traveling by
birch-bark, enough of camping wherever a
good place invited them, and enough of eating
whatever they could secure.

Below Cairo the low lands widen. There
are no distinct hills or bluffs on the west side,
while the Chickasaw Bluffs which stretch
from Cairo to Memphis are in places ten
miles from the river.

A long time ago the Gulf of Mexico extended
probably as far north as Cairo, and
the great flood-plain from Cairo to the Gulf
is land, which was made by the Mississippi.
From the Alleghenies, from the Rocky Mountains,
from the Black Hills, the Ozarks, and
the prairies of Minnesota, the streams are
ever bringing down fine, fertile soil into the
Mississippi, which spreads it at times of high
water over fields, forests, and swamps and
carries some of it into the gulf. So great is
the amount of fine soil carried by the great
river that every year it would make a vast
block a square mile in area and four hundred
feet high.

Of all the travelers on the *Grey Hawk*, Tatanka
took the keenest interest in everything
around him; for he had, before this trip, never
seen the Mississippi farther south than La
Crosse in Wisconsin. “Why do the white
people need so many ships?” he wondered.
“What will they do with all the big guns they
have, and where are all the soldiers going to
fight!”

“My friend,” Barker told him, “wait till
we reach Vicksburg. There you will see
soldiers and guns.”

“Where do all the black people live?” he
asked. “Do they live in the woods and come
out to work in the fields of cotton that we
have seen?

“If our young men could have seen all the
soldiers and ships and guns and towns of the
white people, they never would have made
war against them.”

The second day on the boat was a Sunday
and the pastry-cook did his best to furnish a
wonderful collection of cakes, pies, and jellies.

Barker and the boys could not help being
amused at the way Tatanka looked furtively
at the sumptuous Sunday dinner. The variously
colored jellies served in tall glasses, especially
excited his-curiosity and suspicion.

“Is it medicine or is it to eat?” he whispered
to Barker.

“It’s all to be eaten,” Barker informed
him. “Don’t think again of bad medicine on
this boat.”

“If the Sioux chiefs were here,” Tatanka
remarked with a smile, “they would have to
carry away many glasses of food, for it is
the custom of the Indians to take away with
them whatever they cannot eat at a feast.

“Captain Banks must be very rich to have
so many dishes on his ship.”

The pilot of the *Grey Hawk* did not know
the river well enough to run after dark, so
the passengers saw the whole distance by
daylight.

At night a group of colored deck-hands appeared
as minstrels for the entertainment of
the passengers.

“The black men have big white teeth and
big white eyes, and they can sing and dance,”
Tatanka remarked, “but they couldn’t give
the Sioux war-whoop.”

About the 20th of June the steamer tied up
at Haynes Bluff on the Yazoo River.

Tatanka, who had wondered at the soldiers
and ships at New Madrid, was here simply
bewildered. Ships, teams, mule-teams, ox-teams,
horse-teams, and soldiers and more
soldiers everywhere; infantry, cavalry, and
terrible artillery. Tatanka, with the
observant eyes of an Indian scout, saw everything,
but hardly spoke a word all day.

Grant had by this time about 70,000 men,
an army about ten times as large as the
whole Sioux nation. From Haynes Bluff
southward his lines were stretched out and
entrenched over a distance of fifteen miles.

Over hills, through ravines, through woods
and cane-brakes ran the sheer endless line of
rifle-pits, trenches, parapets, and batteries.
And in front of the Union works, rose in grim
defiance the lines and pits and batteries of
the Confederates. The lines of the two armies
ran about three miles east of Vicksburg
over wooded hills which rise about two hundred
feet above the river. For one month
since the 19th of May the Confederate army
under General John C. Pemberton and the
city of Vicksburg had been besieged, by the
Union army, while the Union fleets held the
river above and below the city.

General Pemberton, now in command at
Vicksburg, was the same man, who two years
ago had taken his battery from Fort Ridgely
to La Crosse on the *Fanny Harris*.

Grant had at first attempted to take the
city by assault, but had found that the Confederates
were so strongly entrenched and
defended their lines so stubbornly that the
Northern army had to settle down to a regular
siege with the object of starving their opponents
into surrender.

Many Northern people came to visit their
friends in Grant’s army. They brought
with them turkeys and chickens and ducks
as gifts to the Boys in Blue, but for once the
soldiers did not appreciate these delicacies.
While they were maneuvering and fighting to
get into their present position on the hills in
the rear of Vicksburg, Grant had boldly cut
loose from his base of supplies. Foraging
parties had scoured the plantations for anything
they could find, and the army had
largely existed on poultry.

“Give us bacon and bread!” was now the
cry. “We are sick of anything that crows
or quacks or gobbles; we are sick of all meat
with wings. Give us bacon and bread!”

Once while Grant was riding along the
lines, a soldier recognizing him called in a
low voice, “Hardtack.” In a moment the
cry ran along the whole line, “Hardtack!
Hardtack!” Grant assured the men that a
road had been built for the distribution of
regular commissary supplies such as bread,
hardtack, coffee, sugar, bacon, and salt meat.
The men at once gave a ringing cheer, and
on the next day full rations were issued to
the whole army.

The four travelers from the North had
plenty of opportunity to watch the operations
of a great siege, and Barker met several men
whom he had known in Indiana and Minnesota.

There was little fighting now, but much digging
of pits and trenches and some mining
and counter-mining.

“We are just camping here,” an old acquaintance
told Barker, “and the digging is
good. No rocks in these hills as in the hills
of New England and New York.

“If the Johnnies weren’t camping so
blasted close to us, it would be a fine life.
As it is, the man who shows his head above
the parapets is done for. The sharpshooters
get him.

“I just got through digging and sitting in
a pit twenty-four hours.

“Three men from our company were detailed
to dig an advance rifle-pit. We started
after dark with picks and shovels. Two men
with picks scratched up the dirt, the third
man threw it out. We made no noise; a
mole couldn’t have worked more silently.
Heavens, how we scratched and dug! By
daylight, our pit was deep enough to shelter
us. It had to be or we wouldn’t have come
back. But it was not deep enough for us to
stand up. All day we sat and lay in that hole.
At noon the sun almost roasted us brown,
although we crouched against the shaded
wall.

“In the afternoon it began to rain and
some of our dirt washed back into the pit.

“‘Mike,’ I said to my Irish fellow-digger,
‘I guess we’ll have to swim or surrender.’

“‘By me faith,’ Mike replied, ‘I’ll wait
till the water runs over me gun-muzzle. We
can’t surrender because our shirts are too
dirty for white flags.’

“We agreed that Mike was right, and sitting
in the sticky mud, we ate the rest of our
bread and bacon before the rain could spoil
it.

“After the rain was over, some sharpshooters
began to practice on our pit. They
couldn’t hit us, and we were right glad that
they gave us something to think and talk
about.

“After dark three other men relieved us
and we had a chance to stretch our bones.”

“What did these men have to do?” the
boys wanted to know.

“Deepen the pit,” the soldier told them,
“and widen it to right and left in the direction
of two other rifle-pits. You see in that
way we push our lines closer and closer to
the enemy.

“In many places we are so close now that
the men can talk to each other.”

Quite often the Union soldiers who were
short of tobacco would barter bacon or bread
for tobacco, because the Confederates at this
time were beginning to feel the shortage of
food.

All through the Civil War the men in both
armies showed a fine spirit of chivalry to the
enemy, whenever duty and the stern law of
war would permit acts of courtesy and kindness.

At one time in the Vicksburg siege a dead
mule between the lines became unbearably
offensive to the Confederates.

“Heh, Yanks!” a soldier shouted, “we’ve
got to bury that mule. He’s smelling us
out.”

“All right,” the Yankee boys replied.
“We smelled him yesterday. Send out three
men, and we’ll send three. Say, Johnnies,
better stick up a white rag, when you’re coming
out, so our boys don’t make a mistake!”

The mule was covered with dirt. The
The soldiers exchanged various little articles
and swapped some yarns and jokes.

“Yanks, when are you coming to town?”
the Southerners asked.

“We’ll be there on the Fourth. By that
time your grub will be gone.”

“Like thunder you will,” the Boys in Grey
returned the banter. “Why, men, we’ve got
enough grub to last till winter. If you Yanks
stick around long enough, we’ll invite you to
a Christmas pudding.”

“Many thanks,” the Northerners came
back; “you can’t fool us on mule-meat and
river-soup. We’ll bring our own rations
when we come in.”

A moment later the men had returned to
their lines.

“Look out for your heads,” the call rang
out. “We’re going to shoot.”

The men who had just enjoyed a friendly
visit, were again facing each other in the
life-and-death struggle for the control of the
Mississippi.

Tatanka and the boys were just having
the time of their lives with all the new and
exciting things they heard and saw. Barker
was as much interested, but he kept his eyes
open for the one enemy he must either elude
or defeat. He felt sure that if Hicks were
still alive he was not far from Haynes Bluff
and the Union lines.

CHAPTER XXI—WHEREIN OLD ENEMIES MEET
====================================

Barker, through the influence of Captain
Banks, had found quarters for his party in a
vacant corner of an old warehouse. Other
rooms were not procurable and in these secluded
quarters, he felt safe from annoying
and curious visitors, and from various camp-followers
always found in the rear of an
army.

He was most anxious to get the boys into
Vicksburg and start for home with Tatanka,
who had so loyally shared all the dangers
and hardships of the long journey.

But how to get into Vicksburg was a puzzle.
Securing a pass seemed out of the question
and any other way that he could think
of looked either impossible or extremely dangerous,
because sentinels and patrols of both
Grant’s and Pemberton’s armies watched the
river day and night.

He feared that in the confusion and excitement
of surrender, even if it did come soon,
he might fail to find the parents of his boys.
Between this anxiety and the possibility of
again meeting Hicks, he lay awake, thinking
a good part of the night.

The next forenoon the four men from the
North accompanied a train of wagons with
rations and ammunitions for the soldiers east
of Vicksburg.

The boys were again in high spirits. They
felt sure that they would soon be at home,
and there were so many new things to be seen
that they had no time to feel sad. The horrors
of war were but little visible, because
there had been no active fighting for a month.

Barker, however, walked along in thoughtful
silence.

“I must get the lads into town and I must
kill or capture Hicks, if we set eyes on him
again,” were the thoughts ever in his mind.

About the middle of the forenoon the long
line of wagons halted on account of some obstruction
ahead. Barker was chatting pleasantly
with a number of teamsters, “mule-skinners,”
as the soldiers called them. He
had told them that he wanted to get the lads
into Vicksburg and he had told them about
the man, who for some reason, was bound to
keep the boys in the North even at the risk of
having them killed by the Sioux. The men
became much interested, for even the roughest
of men are quickly stirred in their sympathy
by injustice and cowardly crime.

Three horsemen came slowly along the side
of the road. They stopped as they reached
the group of teamsters.

The foremost of them dismounted, walked
slowly up to Barker, reached out his hand and
said with suppressed excitement: “Hello,
Barker, I’m glad to see you.”

“Hello, Hicks,” replied the trapper, returning
the salute without offering his hand.
“I can’t say that I’m glad to see you.”

“Where are the boys?” asked Hicks.

“My boys are back a way,” Barker spoke
firmly, the color rising in his cheeks and his
gray eyes flashing, “and you and yours aren’t
going to touch them.”

Hicks turned white and made a movement
as if to draw a pistol.

Without a word from Barker three husky
men sprang upon him and several pistols covered
the other two men, who were ordered
to dismount.

“Search him!” said Barker. “He is the
man. I want to know why he wants possession
of the boys.”

Hicks tried to tell the lies about kidnapped
nephews and stolen horses, but the teamsters
shook him into silence.

“Close up,” one of the men ordered.
“You’re too late; we know all about you.”

A soiled piece of paper was found on Hicks.

    “The bearer of this,” it read, “is to receive
    $10,000 if no heirs of Col. Henry P. Deming
    are found before January first, 1864.

    “John C. Chesterton.”

“What does it mean?” demanded Barker.

“I don’t know,” protested Hicks. “I
didn’t know I had the rag and don’t know
where it came from.”

“All right!” said the spokesman of the
teamsters. “Boys, tie him to that gum-tree.

“Hicks, you have just five minutes to explain
that paper and say anything else you
may want to say.

“Take a look at your pistols, boys!”

Hicks began to tremble.

“Let me go,” he groaned, “and I’ll tell the
truth.”

“Tell the truth!” shouted the men, “and
we’ll see.”

“Colonel Deming,” Hicks began, “is the
boys’ grandfather. Their mother married
against his wishes. He disinherited her, and
made a will that Chesterton, a distant relative,
should fall heir to the Deming plantation,
which is very valuable, if no children of his
daughter were found before January 1st,
1864.

“Chesterton learned about the two lads
and hired me to keep the two boys out of
sight. I didn’t mean to harm them.”

“Like blazes you didn’t!” cried the spokesman.
“You deserted them when the Indians
broke out.

“Boys, get a rope; the fellow is too rank
rotten for our bullets!”

An officer with a patrol came along and inquired
what all the row was about, and the
teamsters told him the story, which was corroborated
by Barker.

“I don’t want him hanged,” Barker added,
“but I don’t want to see his face again.

“Hicks,” he spoke calmly, turning to the
prisoner, “I’ll shoot you on sight, if you ever
cross my trail again!”

The officer thought a minute.

“Let him go, men,” he decided. “Don’t
soil your hands on him.

“Here,” he ordered two soldiers, “take
him out of our lines to that open field. He is
to trot straight for the timber east. If he
stops running, you shoot him.

“Hicks, if you ever show your face inside
our lines again, we’ll find a tree for you
pretty quick. March!

“My regiment can make good use of these
three horses.”

.. figure:: images/illus-230.jpg
   :figclass: illustration
   :align: center
   :alt: “Take him out of our lines to that open field.”

   “Take him out of our lines to that open field.”

“What about these two fellows? Can we
hang them? We’ve got the rope all ready.”
The men asked their questions half in earnest
and half in grim jest.

“They were partners of Judas Hicks.”

The two prisoners protested their innocence,
claiming that they had believed the
story of Hicks about kidnapped nephews and
stolen horses.

“Give us a chance to go back north or put
us to work here. We’re innocent of any
crime.”

“That sounds good,” said the officer, “the
transport *Northern Star* leaves for St. Louis
to-night or to-morrow. She is short of men.
Restler and Stone, take these men back to
Haynes Bluff and turn them over to the captain
of the *Northern Star*. Tell the captain
he will furnish me a good dinner when he returns
from St. Louis.”

When the officer and his patrol had left,
Barker turned to the group of teamsters.

“Men,” he said, with a choking voice, “you
have done me a great service for which I
can never repay you, but if you ever come
north to Minnesota, I’ll show you the finest
land the Lord put down on this earth.”

“Will it grow cotton and sweet potatoes?”
drawled one of the men.

“No, it won’t do that, but it will grow
everything else. Corn and wheat, fish and
game, and great straight pines.”

The teams of wagons ahead began to move.
The drivers cracked their whips and called:
“Good-bye, old man. You’ll never see Hicks
again. We’ll come north after we get
through at Vicksburg.”

Barker went back and soon found Tatanka
and the boys.

The three were much stirred by the news
about Hicks and his two friends.

Tatanka did not try to conceal his disapproval
of the escape of Hicks.

“The mule-drivers were right,” he
growled. “Hicks was all bad and should
hang. I would have killed him and scalped
him, too.”

“No, you red heathen,” Barker laughed at
him, “you wouldn’t, you are not in the country
of murderous Little Crow. You are in
the lines of Christian soldiers.

“You had better be careful with your big
talk or the soldiers will put you in the guardhouse.”

“I would be glad to live in the guardhouse,
if I could first scalp Hicks.”

“You wouldn’t live in it very long. They
would take you out and shoot you.”

“They could,” Tatanka persisted angrily,
“if I had killed Hicks. A Sioux is not afraid
of death.”

“You black-souled Indian,” Barker chided
him good-naturedly. “I’m glad you didn’t
see him. Now, we’ll all walk back to town.
It’ll be dinner-time when we get there. Tatanka,
you’ll feel less revengeful after you
have filled your ribs with pumpkin-pie and
bacon.

“After dinner you can scout for Hicks and
if you find him, you may scalp him, but if he
keeps going the way he went across that field,
he’ll be in Alabama to-night.”

In the afternoon the boys took a swim in
the river and introduced Tatanka to the ways
and manners of a dugout. The lads had
often traveled in a dugout before they went
to Minnesota, and they soon convinced Tatanka
that a log canoe was as safe as a birch
canoe. In fact they claimed it was much
safer, “because,” they said, “you can ride on
either side of it. You don’t have to keep
it right side up.”

Barker also went down to the Yazoo River
and took his first lessons in handling a dugout,
but he soon returned to town to see if he
couldn’t find some way of getting into Vicksburg.

An old fisherman to whom Barker broached
the subject, carefully, gave him this advice:

“Stranger,” he said, “there be a fellow in
the Union army somewhere. His name is U. S. Grant.
Ye may have heard of him. They
say he is much set on getting into that town.
May be if ye and he put your heads together
ye can find a way to get in.”

“Look here, my friend,” Barker replied,
somewhat angered, “I have a very good reason
for wanting to get into Vicksburg.”

“I reckon ye have that,” the old fisherman
replied, testily. “I reckon ye are a Confederate
spy or a Federal spy. If ye are, ye’ll
have to find your own way into town. Ye
cant get me into trouble. Two of my sons
are in General Pemberton’s army, if they
haven’t been killed. I’m too old to fight, and
I won’t mix up with spies. Ye’re the third
stranger this week that’s talked to me about
getting into Vicksburg, so ye’ll have to pardon
me, if I’m a bit techy. I tell them all my
boat’s not running.”

Barker protested that he was neither a
Confederate nor a Federal spy.

“Well, if ye aren’t a spy, ye can’t get in.
It’s only birds and fish and spies that can
get in. We can’t even smuggle in a side of
bacon for our boys. I hear they’re eating
rats and mules with young cane for vegetables.”

Barker was silent. His sympathy went
out to the old man, whom like thousands north
and south the great war had made sad and
lonely.

“If ye ain’t a spy,” the old man took up
the conversation again, “I’ll give ye a bit of
advice. Don’t ye talk to anybody about getting
into Vicksburg. It’s a bad subject for
conversation just now at this place.

“The Union men would turn ye over to
the soldiers, and there are still men here
whose hearts are filled with hatred against the
North.

“When the war began I hated Lincoln and
all men north. I have seen enough of the
men from the North that I hate them no more,
but I am sad and lonely and I pray that the
war may soon end.”

CHAPTER XXII—THE OLD TRAPPER’S SECRET
=====================================

The next day the boys and Tatanka again
traveled in a dugout up and down the Yazoo
River. Barker himself also went in a dugout
within a mile or two of the point where the
Union line touched the Mississippi.

He returned after the boys and Tatanka
had gone to bed, but they were still awake,
because Tatanka had been telling them how
many years ago, he and five other men had
gone on the warpath against the Chippewas,
the hereditary enemies of the Sioux.

The Chippewas used to come down in
canoes on the Mississippi and fall upon an
unsuspecting Sioux camp. After taking a
scalp or two they would leave their canoes
and return north across the forest. The
Sioux would follow them, but they could seldom
accomplish anything because they were
always in danger of being ambushed by the
retreating Chippewas. It was one of those
stories Tatanka had just told with much detail.

“Where have you been, Mr. Barker?” the
lads asked.

“I have been scouting,” the old man answered,
apparently in high spirits. “I have
taken a look at the rivers and the country and
have visited with soldiers and officers and
other men.

“I have also sent a letter to your parents.”

“How did you do that!” the boys inquired
eagerly.

“One of our soldiers tied it to a piece of
green wood and threw it over the Confederate
breastworks.

“It may not be delivered, but I took a
chance at it.”

The boys asked many other questions, but
the old man would not talk and told the boys
it was high time to go to sleep.

In the morning he told them that they were
all to walk down toward the mouth of the
Yazoo.

“We may camp there somewhere to-night,”
he said, “and we may come back. We’ll put
plenty of lunch in our pockets, but we leave
all our stuff right here.”

They did not have to walk all the way.
Various conveyances were going in their direction.
It turned out that Barker didn’t
really want to go to the mouth of the Yazoo;
instead he took his party several miles farther
close to the bank of the Mississippi,
about a mile above the place where the Union
line touched the river. Here they made camp
under a clump of low trees and Barker went
to a neighboring farm house for a jug of
water.

“We might as well eat,” Barker suggested
when he returned. “You boys must be hungry
as wolves after our long tramp this afternoon.”

“May we build a fire?” the boys asked.

“No, I think we had better not,” the old
man replied. “It might attract some visitors
that we don’t want to-night.”

In the far North, the midsummer twilights
last a long time. Along the international
boundary one can read in the open until nine
o’clock, but in the South, daylight passes
quickly into night.

When the four travelers had finished their
supper it was dark.

“Mr. Barker,” asked Tim, “are we going
to stay here all night? It will soon be pitch-dark.”

“Yes, it will be very dark. It is cloudy and
it looks as if we might have a storm,” admitted
the trapper.

The lads were mystified by Barker’s answer,
but Bill felt that the trapper did not
wish to answer any questions and that he had
some secret plan to carry out.

But little Tim was less discreet. “Shall
we build a lean-to?” he asked.

“No, Timmy,” the old man answered, smiling.
“I reckon we won’t. If the good Lord
sends us a shower to-night, I reckon we’ll
just get wet. The rains in this country are
warm and it will not hurt us to get wet.

“Let’s go down to the river and see the
water run by.”

The trapper led the way under tall trees,
and the other three followed in silence. If
Tatanka knew anything about Barker’s plan,
he did not betray his knowledge by either
word or gesture.

At the foot of a large sycamore Barker
stopped. It was now so dark that the trees
across the river were not visible, but as the
boys looked over the steep bank they could
just see the bulk of a large dugout swaying
in the current under some overhanging
branches.

“Oh, Mr. Barker,” Bill whispered, “somebody
keeps his boat here. Can you see it?”

“Yes, boys,” the old man replied in a
whisper. “I know about it. It’s our boat.
I bought it yesterday.

“Just slip down as quietly as you can and
lie down in the middle of it. Tatanka and I
will do the paddling.

“And no matter what happens, you boys
keep quiet. We are going to Vicksburg.”

“Mr. Barker, did you get a pass?” Tim
whispered anxiously.

“Never mind, Tim,” Barker ordered, “you
just lie still and keep quiet now. Don’t move
and don’t speak till I tell you.”

Sitting low in the bottom of the craft, Barker
and the Indian paddled the large dugout
into midstream, where both shores were lost.
For a little while they paddled without making
the slightest noise, as if they were hunting
moose or deer on their northern streams.
Then Barker lifted his paddle out of the
water.

“Down!” he whispered. “Lie flat and
drift.”

For some time the dugout drifted like a
dead log swinging around to right and left
with the current. The boys lay absolutely
still, hearing their own hearts beat and listening
to the low sound of the current against the
sides of the dugout.

Barker rose up slowly. “Paddle,” he
whispered; “we are drifting into the timber.”

Again they paddled in silence.

A flash of lightning threw a gleam of light
over the dark water. A dugout shot out from
under the timber on the west bank.

“Who goes there? Halt!” a low deep
voice called, and the four travelers heard the
click of two guns.

“We are friends,” Barker replied.

“Pull in here!” the order came from the
other craft.

Barker steered toward the shore and found
himself alongside of two Confederate dugouts,
with two men in each.

The leader flashed a lantern at the travelers.

“Who are you and where are you going?”
he demanded. “Get out; we have to search
you.”

The searchers found a piece of fresh beef
and two loaves of bread and some coffee.

“That’s rich pickings,” the leader commented.
“We haven’t had any beef between
our teeth for two weeks.

“Come back in the woods a way and we’ll
roast some of it, right away. But we can’t
build a fire here. The Yanks have a lot of
ammunition to waste and they might shoot
some Minié balls at our camp-fire.”

Their four captors seemed hungry, for they
ate all the bread and meat and drank the
coffee as if they had been crossing a desert.

“That was good of you,” the leader remarked.
“Wheat-bread, beef, and coffee are
rather scarce in our town just now. We’ve
been living on corn-meal and mule-steak.

“Now, Stenson,” he continued, “you take
this bunch down to the guard-house and they
can tell their story to the provost marshal in
the morning. I reckon they don’t care to be
shot before daylight.”

“Mr. Barker,” Tim asked, after they had
been locked in a small room, “do you think
they will shoot us?”

“Don’t worry, boys,” Barker said kindly.
“We haven’t done anything they can shoot
us for. Just lie down and go to sleep.
Thank God, we’re in Vicksburg at last.”

The examination next morning was not
very formidable. It was easy for Barker to
prove that he and his company were not
Northern spies; moreover the meeting of the
boys with their parents convinced the military
authorities that Barker had told them
the exact truth.

“But how did you get past the Union gunboats?”
one of the officers inquired. “Did
you get a pass?”

“If you please, gentlemen,” the old trapper
replied with a shrewd smile, “you see we
got by and I reckon as long as we don’t want
to pass them again, it really makes no difference
how we did it.”

The officer was satisfied, but one of his
colleagues took up the inquiry.

“My friend,” he said, with a suppressed
smile, “you have shown some ability as a
blockade-runner, but your naval architecture
is peculiar. Why did you nail that sheet
iron to the inside of your ship? Don’t you
know that it is customary to put the iron
on the outside?”

At this question everybody laughed good-naturedly
and with a broad grin, the old
man replied:

“Well, you see, gentlemen, I had undertaken
to deliver those lads alive in Vicksburg,
and I was afraid that some of your
men might fire at us before we had time to
surrender. I was in a bit of a hurry when
I converted that dugout into an iron-clad and
I was afraid that she wouldn’t navigate well
if I nailed the iron to the outside, because I
was too much rushed to make a good job
of it.”

“Well,” the presiding officer decided, “I
guess we’ll have to let you stay. It would
be cruel to send you back. Those Yankee
gunners might start practicing on you. Too
bad you couldn’t smuggle in a little more
fresh beef and coffee and white bread.”

“Should have been mighty glad to do it,”
the trapper assented, and at that the court
adjourned.

The parents of the lads had received most
of the letters the boys and Barker had sent,
including the one thrown over the Confederate
parapets.

Of Hicks they had neither heard nor seen
anything, and by his silence he stood condemned.

Like most people in Vicksburg during the
siege, the Fergusons lived in a cave, where
they were fairly safe from mortar shells and
Parrott shells which the Union gunboats and
batteries threw into the city every day.

For the sum of fifteen dollars two negroes
dug a cave for Barker and Tatanka. Cave-digging
had become a profession in Vicksburg
and many of the colored men made good
wages at it.

Barker and his party had heard a great
deal of shooting and cannonading but now
they were in the city at which the guns were
aimed.

The mortar-boats, anchored below the city,
did most of the bombarding. The mortars
were short guns throwing large shells. They
had to be aimed high and the shell fell almost
vertically or with a great high curve.

This vertical fire did not do very much
damage, but it drove practically the whole
civilian population into caves in the high
clay-banks. The civilians who had remained
in Vicksburg had done so against the wishes
of General Pemberton, and they were now living
in constant terror of the shells, although
very few people were injured or killed.

On the second day of Barker’s stay in
Vicksburg, the bombardment, beginning at
daylight, was especially heavy. Many of the
people of Vicksburg had become so accustomed
to the rushing and exploding of the
shells that they gathered at various high
points to watch the shells fly and drop.

Barker tried to induce Tatanka to go with
him to Sky Parlor Hill, a high point where
a good many people had assembled, but Tatanka
would not come.

He sat in front of his cave and whenever
he saw or heard a shell, he ducked into the
cave as the boys expressed it.

“No, my friend,” he said to Barker. “If
you said I should fight Chippewas on Sky
Parlor Hill, I would come, but of the big
roaring shells I am afraid.”

It was in vain that Barker and the boys explained
to him that the mortars were not
shooting at Sky Parlor Hill, and that the big
guns could not aim at any one person. He
wouldn’t leave the entrance of the cave.

“You go and come back and tell me,” he
said. “I like this place better than Sky Parlor
Hill. May be I shall go with you to-morrow.”

At night the mortar shells with their fuses
made a wonderful display of grim fireworks.
After the shells rose to the greatest height,
they fell so rapidly that a trail of fire seemed
to be following them. Generally when a
shell struck the ground or a building, it exploded,
but some remained dead, owing to
imperfect fuses, like a fire-cracker that does
not go off.

A district in which the shells fell was at
once deserted; and some caves sold very
cheap, because their owners did not consider
them safe.

The Parrott shells fired from the besieging
batteries were more feared and did more
damage than the mortar shells thrown by the
fleet. One of those came with a horrid shriek
and buried itself in the ground in front of
the cave in which the boys and their parents
were eating their supper. Although the
shell did not explode, Tatanka was so scared
by it that for the rest of the evening, he would
not leave his cave at all.

The next morning, through the courtesy of
an officer, Barker received permission for
himself and his company to visit the quarters
of the officer, a few hundred yards in the
rear of the Confederate fortifications.

Here the ground was everywhere strewn
with fragments of shells, and with flattened
and twisted Minié balls which had struck the
trees before they had dropped as spent balls.
Among the broken shells the ground was peppered
with the bullets from exploded shrapnels.

The quarters of the officer were practically
a cave, or rather what the early settlers on
the Western plains called a dugout. It was
built on the same plan on which boys build
their little caves to play Indian or Robinson
Crusoe, only it was larger and more commodious.
Its opening faced west, away from
Union and Confederate lines. Its roof of
logs and earth was strong enough to afford
perfect protection against rifle fire and shrapnel,
and it was so located that heavy shells
were not at all likely to strike it.

In this place the officer received and made
his reports, and here he rested or slept, when
he was off duty. However, his hours of rest
and sleep were very few, because the Confederate
regiments were so shorthanded both
in officers and men that there was little time
for rest and sleep.

The Confederate soldiers had orders not
to fire unless they were attacked, because
they were short of ammunition, but from the
Union lines a more or less constant fire of
small arms, shrapnel, and heavy guns was
kept up day after day.

A pouring rain came up while the four
friends were at the quarters of the officer. A
torrent of muddy water broke through the
roof, a big lump of wet dirt fell on the bed,
and mud and water covered the floor. The
four guests fell to and piled bed, chairs, and
table in the dryest corner and protected the
clothes and blankets of their host as well as
they could, but the place looked as if it could
never be made fit to use again. But when
Captain Dent arrived, he just laughed at the
whole mess, as he called it.

“It’s just one of the little accidents of
war,” he added. “My man, Harris, will put
this cabin in good shape before dark. This
is nothing at all. Just think of our starving
boys in the rifle-pits. They often have to
stand and lie in the mud all day.

“If you gentlemen will lend me a hand,
we’ll deepen the trench around this mansion
and stop the leak in the roof.

“You must all stay for supper,” the captain
insisted, when the work was done. “I
have invited three young officers. You’ll enjoy
the company, and if you Northerners are
not too particular, you can have plenty to
eat.”

Harris, the colored man, began cooking,
while Captain Dent showed his visitors
around and told them of many interesting incidents
connected with the siege.

Then the guests came and Harris announced
supper.

“Captain,” one of the young men asked,
“what’s this savory dish your man is serving
us?”

“That,” the captain asserted, without
changing a muscle on his weather-browned
face, “that’s moose-tongue; moose-tongue
from Minnesota. My friend here brought it
down.”

“Tied him behind your boat, I suppose?”
queried the second guest.

“Oh, no; not at all,” Barker promptly entered
into the spirit of the company. “We
used him as motive power. He pulled us
clear into town.”

The third guest and the boys looked a little
puzzled.

“You see,” the trapper quickly explained,
“he was a Chippewa moose and dreadfully
scared of a Sioux. My friend, Tatanka, here,
is a Sioux. Had an awful time getting the
beast to stop for camp. Was bound to keep
going as long as Tatanka was sitting behind
him.”

A ringing laugh went around the table.

“Sir Barker,” the captain took up the
conversation, “how many tongues did he
have?”

“Well, sir,” the trapper drawled out,
“from the noise he could make, I should say
about six, sir. He was sure a wonderful
beast. We were going to exhibit him in town,
but the Quartermaster General took such a
liking to him that we had to give him up.”

Again a peal of laughter went around the
table.

“Harris,” said the third guest, “you’ve
garnished that moose-tongue with green asparagus.
Looks almighty appetizing. Where
did you get it?”

“Wai, massa, I tell you. I cut it myself in
de cane-brake in de nex’ ravine. De Good
Lord hab started a ’sparagus plantation dere,
sure ’nuf,” and a broad smile spread over
Harris’s face like sunshine. He had really
done his best to prepare a feast for his master
and now he was happy because his master
was pleased.

“Gentlemen, fall to,” the captain urged.
“We have here the very best dinner Vicksburg
has to offer. The Planters Hotel could
not beat it, if President Davis himself was
the guest of the city.”

By this time the boys had recovered from
their embarrassment because they saw the
men all acting like happy boys. They had
never suspected that their fatherly friend,
Barker, was so much of a boy, who could
laugh and cut up.

They fell to as heartily as all the older
boys, although the scene of Old Harmony’s
team of six rolling down the bluff at Fort
Ridgely flashed through their minds.

“It tastes just like beef-tongue,” Tim remarked
to Bill.

For the present, both host and guests forgot
the dangers, the sufferings and the horrors
of war. They were all just boys at dinner.

When the company one after the other, began
to sniff at the odor of coffee, Captain
Dent called aloud for Harris.

“Look here, you black rascal,” he accosted
the surprised cook, “what are you making
that smell of coffee with? There hasn’t been
any coffee in town for a week.”

“Massa, dat coffee smell is sure no ghost.
Dat hunter geman from de North gib it to me
and some sugar, too.”

“Where did you get it?” the officers asked
with one voice.

“Trapped it, just trapped it. I caught
the coffee, and Tatanka crawled up on the
sugar.”

A loud boyish laugh rang around the table.

“Three cheers for Barker and Tatanka.
May they hunt long and prosper,” the oldest
officer proposed, and Bill and Tim joined
heartily in the cheers.

“Mr. Barker,” cried the captain, “you and
Tatanka paddle your iron-clad up the river
and crawl up on some more coffee and
sugar.”

How much little gifts of luxuries brighten
the life of soldiers in the field can perhaps
only be appreciated by those who have for
weeks or months been reduced to the barest
necessities of life.

After dinner, both host and guests opened
their treasure-troves of stories, serious and
comic. Then the young officers formed an
impromptu trio and many songs, sprung up
during the great siege, rang through the warm
summer night, new words set to old tunes.

    | “’Twas at the siege of Vicksburg,
    | Of Vicksburg, of Vicksburg.
    | ’Twas at the siege of Vicksburg,
    | When the Parrott shells were whistling through the air.
    | Listen to the Parrott shells,
    | Listen to the Parrott shells,
    | The Parrott shells are whistling through the air.”

Shortly after ten the young officers bade
farewell to their host and friends, for at
eleven they, as well as Captain Dent, went on
duty with their men, behind the parapets and
at the batteries.

For a few brief hours they had forgotten
sorrow and hunger and the oppressive gloom
of probable surrender, which like a hideous
specter seemed to come creeping a little
closer every day.

They might attempt to cut their way out,
but the loss of life would be enormous and
the sacrifice would most likely be utterly
useless.

Barker and Tatanka with the boys returned
to town on a dark winding road.

Down the river they could again see the
mortar shells draw their fiery curves and after
the rise and fall of the fire trail, as Tatanka
called it, came the deep booming of the
explosion.

Like the officers, they also were thrown
back into besieged and bombarded Vicksburg,
after a few happy hours of jovial company.

“We should sleep in the woods to-night
and not go back to town,” Tatanka suggested.

“White men can’t sleep in the woods without
blankets,” the trapper replied. “We’ll
go back to our caves. If we didn’t, the father
and mother of the boys would be worried.”

“I think,” Tatanka pointed out, after he
had watched a shell drop, “some day a big
fire-ball will shoot through the roof of our
cave and kill us all. We should live in the
woods.”

“My friend, we can’t live in the woods.”
Barker tried to instruct and calm his fears.
“Shrapnel and rifle fire from the Union lines
sweep the woods everywhere. We would
have to dig a cave there.

“If the mortars or Parrott guns begin to
drop shells near us, we will move to another
place. Until they do, we are safe. Now,
don’t be a squaw, Tatanka. Chippewas and
hostile Sioux have fired at you many times.
Those big shells hardly ever hit anybody; all
they do is to bury and bust themselves in
the clay.”

“All the same,” the Indian persisted, “I
don’t like them. I can’t fight them back. I
wish we were home in Minnesota. I would
not be afraid of fighting Chippewas or bad
Sioux. Are we going back soon?”

“We can’t start back until after the siege,”
Barker explained, somewhat impatiently.

“Couldn’t we slip out at night?” Tatanka
asked.

“We are not going to try it. The gunners
on the boats would sink us or shoot us as
spies or blockade-runners. I’m all-fired glad
that we got in without being sunk or shot.
We’re not going to try to get out.”

“How long is the siege going to last?” Bill
asked.

“It can’t last much longer, because there
is but little food left. The men are all weak
and live on half-rations.”

“Couldn’t they cut their way out!” Tim
asked timidly.

“They can’t do it. Grant has twice as
many men as Pemberton, and Grant’s men
are all strong and have plenty of food and
ammunition.”

CHAPTER XXIII—THE LAST DAYS OF VICKSBURG
========================================

It had taken Grant a whole year to place
his army in position on the hills in the rear
of Vicksburg, but he had stuck to the campaign
with the tenacity of a bulldog.

At first he had tried to move his army
south by rail from Memphis, but Van Dorn
had destroyed his supplies and cut the railroad.

He had tried to get his army below Vicksburg
through various channels and bayous on
the west side of the great river, but had found
this plan impossible.

He had tried to come down by way of the
Yazoo and other water-courses on the east
side of the Mississippi, and had had a narrow
escape from disaster. The Confederates had
felled trees across the narrow channels and
had built Fort Pemberton of mud and cotton-bales,
which the Union men found they could
not pass, and in the end they were glad to
get out of the maze of water-courses and endless
swamps and forests.

Then he had dug a canal across a neck of
land below Vicksburg, but the river had risen
and had filled the canal with sand and mud.

At last, Admiral Porter’s gunboats and
transports had rapidly run the batteries of
Vicksburg on a dark night. Grant had
marched his army past Vicksburg on the west
side of the river. He had crossed the river
at Bruinsburg and in a most daring manner
he had cut loose from any base of supplies.
With five days’ rations in their knapsacks his
men had for nearly three weeks lived on the
country, had quickly turned from one hostile
army upon the other and defeated them
in detail. They had driven Pemberton into
Vicksburg. They had built two lines of fortifications,
one facing west against Pemberton
in Vicksburg, and one facing east against
Johnston, and since the nineteenth of May
they held Pemberton in the wooded hills two
miles east of Vicksburg.

Grant’s army, consisting of only about 40,000
men at first, had now been strengthened
to more than 70,000 men. Since the middle
of June, Vicksburg was so closely besieged
that not even a rowboat could get in or out.

On the twenty-second of May, Grant had
tried to take the town by assault, but the Confederates
put up such a stubborn defense that
the attempt failed. Since that time, the
Union army had carried on a regular siege
with the intention of starving Vicksburg and
the Confederate army into surrender.

The Northern soldiers had destroyed the
railroad east of Vicksburg, so that Johnston
could not quickly move upon them and soon
the Union army was so strong that Grant
could have fought Pemberton and Johnston
at the same time. The Union army had now
plenty of food and ammunition and was
strongly entrenched, while the fall of Vicksburg
and the surrender of Pemberton’s brave
army seemed only a matter of time.

By the first of July, it became evident that
Johnston would not be able to relieve either
the city or the garrison.

Provisions were nearly gone and the men
were exhausted by continuous duty and
watching and through the incessant bombardments
by the Union troops.

On the third of July, Generals Pemberton
and Grant met between the lines for a brief
conference.

On the Fourth, the white flag floated over
Vicksburg. The Gibraltar of the Mississippi
had surrendered and 31,000 brave Confederate
soldiers had become prisoners of war.

Grant treated the prisoners with every consideration.
Rations were issued to them by
their captors, and the men who for months
had faced each other as enemies became
friends. The prisoners were not sent north,
but men as well as officers were paroled and
turned over to Major Watts, Confederate
Commissioner for the Exchange of Prisoners.

There was no cheer or taunt from the Federal
soldiers, who stood at arms as the prisoners
marched out of the city; they seemed
to feel sorry for the fate of their late enemies.
Haggard from the hardships of the
siege, the men marched out in silence. Sad
and silent the officers rode away on tired and
dispirited horses, that had for weeks fed on
nothing but mulberry leaves.

In the city also, friendly relations were at
once established between the Union soldiers
and the inhabitants, nor was there a lack of
comic and funny incidents.

A negro servant, overcome by his desire
to shine, rode about the city on his master’s
silver-mounted saddle. After an hour, he
returned with a very long face and a very
old saddle.

“George, where is my saddle!” asked his
master.

“I met a big Yankee soldier and he says
to me, ‘You get off dat horse. I’s gwine to
hab dat fine saddle.’

“I wa’n’t gwine to git off, but he pointed
his pistol at me, and he says, ‘You black nigger,
you git off,’ and I got off, and he gives
me dis old saddle.”

The fall of Vicksburg was an important
event in the Civil War. A few days later, on
the ninth of July, Port Hudson, the last Confederate
stronghold on the Mississippi, also
surrendered, giving the Federals complete
control of the great river and cutting the
Confederacy in two by detaching Arkansas,
Texas, and Louisiana.

The Civil War settled a great question
which had grown so vexing that no man or
party was great enough to settle it, without
appeal to arms. It brought untold sadness
and suffering to thousands of homes, both
North and South, but the South suffered
much more than the North.

It taught a great moral lesson and set a
great example to the world, not merely of
bravery and self-denial—that other nations
have shown and are showing now—it showed
to the world the greatest example of speedy
reconciliation after the war. Had Lincoln
lived through the painful days of reconstruction,
the bitterness and hatred caused by the
war would have vanished even sooner. But
even with the Great Captain passed away, the
best men North and South set earnestly to
work, as soon as the war was over, to bind up
and heal the nation’s wounds.

A few years ago the Veterans in Blue and
the Veterans in Grey met in a friendly reunion
on the once blood-drenched field of Gettysburg.
It was the greatest example of reconciliation
the world has ever seen, an example,
a living sermon, which a war-torn
world will sadly need in the near future.

Barker and his boys did not remain long
in Vicksburg. As Jacob of old was persuaded
by his sons to travel to distant Egypt,
so old Seth Ferguson was led by his sons to
the balmy fertile prairies of the Sky-tinted
River.

In peace and happy reunion the Ferguson
family with Barker and Tatanka as guides,
traveled up the Mississippi River by steamboat,
and the boys never tired of pointing
out to their parents the spots where they had
camped and the cliffs and bluffs they had
climbed.

In the bottoms of the upper river, great
masses of asters fringed the brown sandbars.
When the party reached Fort Ridgely, the
Minnesota prairie was ablaze with goldenrod,
sunflowers, and purple stars, and the
blackbirds were gathering in great flocks on
the marshes in anticipation of feasting on
the crops of wild rice, for which they have a
great liking.

After having spent almost a year on the
Great River, the lads found their weather-beaten
shanty spared by the furors of war,
but the wild prairie had already begun to
reclaim its own, as if impatient of human intrusion.

In the boys’ garden patch, concealed by
great rag-weeds and rich-scented milkweeds,
a woodchuck had dug his den. A jungle of
velvet-leaved false sunflowers almost barred
the way to the cabin door. In a corner under
the boys’ bunk, a family of chipmunks had
established themselves and with mumpsy-looking
cheeks were racing back and forth
laying in a store of wild hazelnuts and long
rice-like grains of speargrass.

“You are lucky,” Tatanka remarked,
“that Manka, the skunk, has not made his
tunnels under your house. He would be hard
to move.”

Seth Ferguson filed on the claim on which
the boys had lived.

The woodchuck was allowed possession of
the garden-patch until next spring, but Bill
and Tim harvested an abundant crop of the
wild fruit of the land—butternuts, hazelnuts,
wild grapes, chokeberries and rich sweet
plums.

Barker did not return to following the trail
of minks and foxes, but like the Fergusons
broke up the virgin prairie to raise wheat and
corn. When he grew too old to walk behind
the plow, he gave his farm to his boys, Bill
and Tim, who, a few years later, carried him
to his last resting-place on the bluff overlooking
the winding Minnesota River.

Tatanka, with some other friendly Sioux,
was assigned land on the Redwood River,
where his descendants live to this day.

The great war in the South, and the bloody
tragedy of Minnesota are seen to-day through
the mellow light of history. There is no
longer bitterness and hatred between white
men and red men, between North and South.

On the Fourth of July, the bright Stars and
Stripes float over North and South, over the
Indian settlement on the Redwood, and over
the white men’s towns around them. The
tomahawk has been buried forever, but the
Indian youths meet the white lads from
farms and towns, all armed with bats and
mitts, in the great American national game,
the game that is destined to conquer the
world with the gospel of vigor and good will.

The Minnesota, Sky-tinted Water, and the
Mississippi, the Everywhere River, wind
their way to the Gulf as of yore, in beauty
and grandeur.

And here ends our tale of two wars and
of the Lure of the Great River.

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    ON THE TRAIL OF THE SIOUX

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    The Adventures of Two Boy Scouts on the Minnesota Frontier

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    By D. LANGE

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    Illustrated 12mo Cloth Price, Net, $1.25

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    This story was written by a prominent educator to satisfy the
    insistent demand of active boys for an “Indian Story,” as well as to
    help them to understand what even the young endured in the making of
    our country. The story is based on the last desperate stand of the
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    Minnesota frontier in the early days of the Civil War.

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    THE SILVER ISLAND OF THE CHIPPEWA

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    By D. LANGE

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    Here is a boys’ book that tells of the famous Silver Island in Lake
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    LOST IN THE FUR COUNTRY

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    By D. LANGE

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    Illustrated 12mo cloth $1.25 *net*

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    Mr. Lange is the superintendent of schools, St. Paul, Minn., and is
    famed for his knowledge of both natural and political history. He is
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    IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH

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    By D. LANGE

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    Illustrated by W. L. Howes

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    The story opens at a Hudson Bay trading post, where the father of a
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    historic buffalo hunts, after which they make a thrilling escape from
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    earlier days knew it.

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    wild life.”—*Philadelphia Public Ledger.*

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    Books by Everett T. Tomlinson.

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    THE WAR OF 1812 SERIES

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    Seven volumes Cloth Illustrated Price, Net, $1.35 each

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    No American writer for boys has ever occupied a higher position than
    Dr. Tomlinson, and the “War of 1812 Series” covers a field attempted
    by no other juvenile literature in a manner that has secured continued
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        | The Search for Andrew Field
        | The Boy Soldiers of 1812
        | The Boy Officers of 1812
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        | The Boy Sailors of 1812

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    The author stands in the very front rank in ability to instruct the
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    CAMPING ON THE ST. LAWRENCE, Or, On the Trail of the Early Discoverers

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    THE HOUSE-BOAT ON THE ST. LAWRENCE, Or, Following Frontenac

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    CRUISING IN THE ST. LAWRENCE, Or, A Summer Vacation in Historic Waters

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    THE BOY ELECTRICIAN

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    Practical Plans for Electrical Toys and Apparatus, with an
    Explanation of the Principles of Every-Day Electricity

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    By ALFRED P. MORGAN

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    Author of “Wireless Telegraphy Construction for Amateurs” and
    “Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony”

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    300 illustrations and working drawings by the author

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    Net, $2.00 Postpaid, $2.25

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    This is the age of electricity. The most fascinating of all books for
    a boy must, therefore, be one dealing with the mystery of this ancient
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    appliances.”—*Popular Electricity and Modern Mechanics.*

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    “This is an admirably complete and explicit handbook for boys who fall
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    Simple explanations of the principles involved make the operation readily
    understandable.”—*Boston Transcript.*

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    “Any boy who studies this book, and applies himself to the making and
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    “A book to delight the hearts of ten thousand—perhaps fifty thousand-American
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    THE BOOK OF ATHLETICS

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    Edited by PAUL WITHINGTON

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    With many reproductions of photographs, and with diagrams

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    8vo Net, $1.50 Postpaid, $1.70

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    Nearly thirty college stars and champions, men like Dr. Kraenzlein,
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    “Here is a book that will serve a purpose and satisfy a need.
    Every important phase of sport in school and college is discussed
    within its covers by men who have achieved eminent success in their
    line. Methods of training, styles of play, and directions for attaining
    success are expounded in a clear, forceful, attractive manner.”—*Harvard Monthly.*

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    “The book is made up under the direction of the best qualified
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    this book as desirable educationally as it is in every other way.”—*Outdoor Life.*

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    \U. S. SERVICE SERIES

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    By Francis Rolt-Wheeler

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    Illustrated from photographs taken in work for U. S. Government

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    Large 12mo Cloth $1.35 each, net

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    “There are no better books for boys than Francis Rolt-Wheeler’s
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    THE BOY WITH THE U. S. SURVEY

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    This story describes the thrilling adventures
    of members of the U. S. Geological
    Survey, graphically woven into a stirring
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    author enjoys an intimate acquaintance with
    the chiefs of the various bureaus in Washing,
    ton, and is able to obtain at first hand the
    material for his books.

    .. vspace:: 1
    
    “There is abundant charm and vigor in the
    narrative which ii sure to please the boy readers
    and will do much toward stimulating their patriotism
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    the vast resources of their country.”—*Chicago News.*

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    THE BOY WITH THE U. S. FORESTERS

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    The life of a typical boy is followed in all its adventurous detail—the
    mighty representative of our country’s government, though young in
    years—a youthful monarch in a vast domain of forest. Replete with
    information, alive with adventure, and inciting patriotism at every step,
    this handsome book is one to be instantly appreciated.

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    “It is a fascinating romance of real life in our country, and will prove a great
    pleasure and inspiration to the boys who read it.”—*The Continent, Chicago.*

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    THE BOY WITH THE U. S. CENSUS

    .. vspace:: 1
    
    Through the experiences of a bright American boy, the author shows
    how the necessary information is gathered. The securing of this often
    involves hardship and peril, requiring journeys by dog-team in the
    frozen North and by launch in the alligator-filled Everglades of Florida,
    while the enumerator whose work lies among the dangerous criminal
    classes of the greater cities must take his life in his own hands.

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    “Every young man should read this story from cover to cover, thereby
    getting a clear conception of conditions as they exist to-day, for
    such knowledge will have a clean, invigorating and healthy Influence
    on the young growing and thinking mind.”—*Boston Globe.*

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    \U. S. SERVICE SERIES

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    By FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER

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    Many illustrations from photographs taken in work for U.S. Government

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    Large 12mo Cloth Net $1.35 per volume

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    “There are no better books for boys than Francis Rolt-Wheeler’s
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    THE BOY WITH THE U. S. FISHERIES

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    With a bright, active American youth as a hero, is told the story of
    the Fisheries, which in their actual importance dwarf every other
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    Aleutian Islands have witnessed more desperate sea-fighting than has
    occurred elsewhere since the days of the Spanish buccaneers, and
    pirate craft, which the U. S, Fisheries must watch, rifle in hand, are
    prowling in the Behring Sea to-day. The fish-farms of the United
    States are as interesting as they are immense in their scope.

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    “One of the best books for boys of all ages, so attractively written
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    hours to finish ...”—*Philadelphia Despatch.*

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    THE BOY WITH THE U. S. INDIANS

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    This book tells all about the Indian as he really was and is; the
    Menominee in his birch-bark canoe; the Iroquois in his wigwam in the
    forest; the Sioux of the plains upon his war-pony; the Apache, cruel
    and unyielding as his arid desert; the Pueblo Indians, with remains of
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    thrilling in its human side by the heroism demanded by the
    little-known adventures of those who do the work of “Uncle Sam.”

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    “An exceedingly Interesting Indian story, because it is true, and not merely
    a dramatic and picturesque incident of Indian life.”—*N. Y. Times.*

    .. vspace:: 1
    
    “It tells the Indian’s story in a way that will fascinate the
    Youngster.”—*Rochester Herald.*

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.. clearpage::

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    \U. S. SERVICE SERIES

    .. vspace:: 1
    
    By FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER

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    Many Illustrations from photographs taken in work for U. S. Government

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    “There are no better books for boys than Francis Rolt-Wheeler’s ‘U. S.
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    .. vspace:: 1
    
    THE BOY WITH THE U. S. EXPLORERS

    .. vspace:: 1
    
    The hero saves the farm in Kansas, which his father is not able to
    keep up, through a visit to Washington which results in making the
    place a kind of temporary experiment station. Wonderful facts of plant
    and animal life are brought out, and the boy wins a trip around the world
    with his friend, the agent. This involves many adventures, while
    exploring the Chinese country for the Bureau of Agriculture.

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    “Boys will be delighted with this story, which is one that inspires
    the readers with the ideals of industry, thrift and uprightness of
    conduct.”—*Argus-Leader, Portland, Me.*

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    The billows surge and thunder through this book, heroism and the
    gallant facing of peril are wrought into its very fabric, and the
    Coast Guard has endorsed its accuracy. The stories of the rescue of
    the engineer trapped on a burning ship, and the pluck of the men who
    built the Smith’s Point Lighthouse are told so vividly that it is hard
    to keep from cheering aloud.

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    “This is an ideal book for boys because it is natural, inspiring, and
    of unfailing interest from cover to cover.”—*Marine Journal.*

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    THE BOY WITH THE U. S. MAIL

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    How much do you know of the working of the vast and wonderful Post
    Office Department? The officials of this department have, as in the
    case of all other Departments covered in this series, extended their
    courtesy to Dr. Rolt-Wheeler to enable him to tell us about one of the
    most interesting forms of Uncle Sam’s care for us.

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    “Stamp collecting, carrier pigeons, aeroplanes, detectives, hold-ups,
    tales of the Overland trail and the Pony Express, Indians, Buffalo
    Bill—what boy would not be delighted with a book in which all these
    fascinating things are to be found?”—*Universalist Leader.*

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    For sale by all booksellers or sent postpaid on receipt of price by the publishers

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    LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., BOSTON

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    PHILLIPS EXETER SERIES

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    By A. T. DUDLEY

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    Cloth, 12mo

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    Illustrated by Charles Copeland

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    Price, net $1.25 each

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    FOLLOWING THE BALL

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    Here is an up-to-date story presenting American boarding-school life and
    modern athletics. Football is an important feature, but it is a story
    of character formation in which athletics play an important part.

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    “Mingled with the story of football is another and higher endeavor,
    giving the book the best of moral tone.”—*Chicago Record-Herald.*

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    MAKING THE NINE

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    The life presented is that of a real school, interesting, diversified,
    and full of striking incidents, while the characters are true
    and consistent types of American boyhood and youth. The athletics
    are technically correct, abounding in helpful suggestions, and the
    moral tone is high and set by action rather than preaching.

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    “The story is healthful, for, while it exalts athletics, it does not
    overlook the fact that studious habits and noble character are
    imperative needs for those who would win success in life.”—*Herald and
    Presbyter, Cincinnati.*

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    IN THE LINE

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    Tells how a stalwart young student won his position as guard, and
    at the same time made equally marked progress in the formation
    of character. Plenty of jolly companions contribute a strong,
    humorous element, and the book has every essential of a favorite.

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    “The book gives boys an interesting story, much football
    information, and many lessons in true manliness.”—*Watchman, Boston.*

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    WITH MASK AND MITT

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    While baseball plays an important part in this story, it is not
    the only element of attraction. While appealing to the natural
    normal tastes of boys for fun and interest in the national game, the
    book, without preaching, lays emphasis on the building up of character.

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    “No normal boy who is interested in our great national game can fail to
    find interest and profit, too, in this lively boarding school
    story.”—*Interior, Chicago.*

    .. vspace:: 1
    
    For sale by all booksellers or sent postpaid on receipt of price by the publishers

    .. vspace:: 1
    
    LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., BOSTON

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    .. vspace:: 1
    
    PHILLIPS EXETER SERIES

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    By A. T. DUDLEY

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    Cloth 12mo Illustrated Price, net $1.25 each

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    THE GREAT YEAR

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    Three fine, manly comrades, respectively captains of the football,
    baseball, and track and field athletic teams, make a compact to support
    each other so that they may achieve a “great year” of triple victory
    over their traditional rival, “Hillbury.”

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    THE YALE CUP

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    The “Cup” is an annual prize given by a club of Yale alumni to the
    member of the Senior class of each of several preparatory schools
    who best combines proficiency in athletics with good standing in his
    studies.

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    A FULL-BACK AFLOAT

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    At the close of his first year in college Dick Melvin is induced to earn
    a passage to Europe by helping on a cattle steamer. The work is not
    so bad, but Dick finds ample use for the vigor, self control, and quick
    wit in emergency which he has gained from football.

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    THE PECKS IN CAMP

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    The Pecks are twin brothers so resembling each other that it was almost
    impossible to tell them apart, a fact which the roguish lads made the
    most of in a typical summer camp for boys.

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    THE HALF-MILER

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    This is the story of a young man of positive character facing the
    stern problem of earning his way in a big school. The hero is not an
    imaginary compound of superlatives, but a plain person of flesh and
    blood, aglow with the hopeful idealism of youth, who succeeds and is
    not spoiled by success. He can run, and he does run—through the
    story.

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    “It is a good, wholesome, and true-to-life story, with plenty of
    happenings such as normal boys enjoy reading about.”—Brooklyn Daily
    Times.

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    For sale by all booksellers or sent postpaid on receipt of price by the publishers

    .. vspace:: 1
    
    LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., BOSTON

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    “INDIAN” STORIES WITH HISTORICAL BASES

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    by D. LANGE

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    12mo Cloth Illustrated

    .. vspace:: 1
    
    Price per volume, $1.25 net

        | ON THE TRAIL OF THE SIOUX
        | THE SILVER ISLAND OF THE CHIPPEWA
        | LOST IN THE FUR COUNTRY
        | IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH
        | THE LURE OF THE BLACK HILLS
        | THE LURE OF THE MISSISSIPPI

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    LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., BOSTON

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