After many dangers and deep anxiety on his part, taking his course by the stars when the fog lifted at night and working his way through it as best he could by day, he finally reached Fort Kearny. The Pawnees had come in three days before, and scouting parties had been searching for Captain Foote’s command about which much anxiety was felt. Help was immediately sent them, and as a result of Stuart’s indomitable will and able services, the little party was rescued and brought safely to the fort. From the autumn of 1857 until the summer of 1860, Stuart was stationed at Fort Riley. During these three years, there were few skirmishes with the Indians and Stuart had leisure to perfect the invention of a saber attachment that he had been thinking of ever since his student days at West Point. This invention was bought and patented by the government in October, 1859, while the inventor was on leave of absence in Virginia, visiting his mother and his friends. It was on the night of the sixteenth of this same October that a band of twenty men, under the leadership of John Brown, seized the United States arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Brown was a fanatic who believed that all slaves should be set free and who had taken an active part in the recent disturbances in Kansas. After seizing the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, he sent out his followers during the night to arrest certain citizens and to call to arms the slaves on the surrounding plantations. About sixty citizens were arrested and imprisoned in the engine house, within the confines of the armory, but the slaves, either through fear or through distrust of Brown and his schemes, refused to obey his summons. [Illustration: ARSENAL AT HARPER’S FERRY] The next morning as soon as news of the seizure of Harper’s Ferry spread over the country, armed men came against Brown from all directions. Before night he and his followers took refuge in the engine house, but it was so crowded that he was obliged to release all but ten of his prisoners. When the news of Brown’s raid was telegraphed to Washington, Lieutenant Stuart, who was at the capital attending to the sale of his patent saber attachment, was requested to bear a secret order to Lieutenant-Colonel Robert E. Lee, his old superintendent at West Point, who was then at his home, Arlington, near Washington city. Stuart learned that Colonel Lee had been ordered to command the marines who were being sent to suppress the insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, and he at once offered to act as aid-de-camp. Colonel Lee, who remembered Stuart well as a cadet, immediately accepted his offer of service.