The warriors and their prisoners start for the Indian country--Boone lightens the journey and puts the captors in good humor--Stephen Halliwell falls ill of a fever--He is in danger of being tomahawked by the savages--Boone undertakes the care of the feeble man--“No Indian shall raise your hair whilst I can raise a hand to prevent it”--Halliwell is doomed to death but Boone stays the executioners--He carries the exhausted man over the last stage of the march--The party arrives at Chillicothe--Boone and others are taken to the British post at Detroit. The month of February, 1778, was unusually mild. A few inches of snow fell during the night following the capture of Boone and his men but the next day a thaw set in. The condition of the ground rendered walking tiresome and disagreeable and made it difficult to secure a dry bed at night. It also obliterated ordinary traces and almost precluded the possibility of pursuers finding and following the trail of the band of Indians and their prisoners. Boone noted this circumstance with satisfaction. His chief anxiety now was lest the men of Boonesborough should attempt a rescue, which could only end in disaster and might induce the savages to revert to their original design of attacking the fort. Before starting upon the march he instructed his men not to resort to any of the usual devices for creating a trace, such as leaving scraps of clothing on bushes, breaking off twigs, pieces of bark, and so on. The Indians divided their captives into three equal squads of nine each, and themselves into four bodies of twenty-five warriors, sandwiching the former between the latter, and this order was maintained upon the daily march. The whites had, of course, been deprived of their weapons and could not have made any concerted attack on their captors with the least chance of success. Any individual attempt at escape during daylight must have been even more hopeless. A consignment of salt having been sent to Boonesborough a few days before the capture, there was but one pack-horse in the camp at the licks when it fell into the hands of the Indians. This animal was loaded with as much of the plunder as it could carry and the heavy rifles were distributed among the Indian ponies, but the arrangement left a large amount of baggage unprovided with carriage and this was distributed among the prisoners. Each had a burden of fifty or sixty pounds, which consisted largely of the blankets and skins with which he was permitted to cover himself at night. Such a load would tire the ordinary man in an hour, but these hardy backwoodsmen could carry it all day and over fifteen miles of heavy ground, not without great fatigue, of course, but without breaking down. Thus they tramped along under the dripping boughs of the silent forest, their moccasins squelching the spongy earth and their long hair hanging wet and stringy about their necks.