From there the flotilla continued on its journey down the Ohio River. At Fort Massac, the army post above the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi where Burr and Wilkinson had conferred in the summer of 1805, Burr presented himself to the commander, Captain Daniel Bissell, who greeted him warmly and extended to him all the courtesies of the post. The party had completed its visit and departed when a messenger arrived posthaste from General Jackson warning Bissell of the nature of the expedition and urging him to halt it. Bissell, having seen the force with his own eyes, sent the messenger back to Jackson with the report that there was nothing to fear from it. From then on Jackson was more than ever convinced that the furore raised by the Administration over the conspiracy was purely political and had no basis in fact. On January 10 the flotilla reached Bayou Pierre, some thirty miles north of Natchez, in Mississippi Territory. There Burr landed and went to pay a call on a friend, Judge Bruin, who lived nearby. And there, in a newspaper handed him by the Judge, he saw his letter of July 29 to Wilkinson and knew for the first time that he had been deserted and betrayed by the General. At Judge Bruin’s, too, he learned of the President’s proclamation and that his arrest had been ordered by the acting governor of the territory, Cowles Meade. According to their later testimony some members of the party proposed resistance to any force that might come to arrest them. But by this time Colonel Burr perceived that matters had gone far enough. It no doubt occurred to him also that resistance to the civil authorities would be most incriminating. Since he was going to base his defense on innocence of any wrongdoing he must act in accordance with that assumption. Therefore, as any innocent man would have done on learning that charges had been preferred against him and that he was, so to speak, a fugitive from justice, Burr hastened to vindicate himself by seeking out Acting Governor Meade and surrendering at discretion. He was taken to the village of Washington, then the capital of Mississippi Territory, where a grand jury was summoned and the territory’s attorney general, one Poindexter, tried to get out an indictment against him. Again, as in Kentucky, the Colonel’s bravado stood him in good stead. The grand jury not only refused to indict him but took the territorial officials to task for having arrested Burr and his men without cause. But the Colonel knew that the respite was only temporary, since the Federal authorities were hot on his trail. So, on February 1, after assuring his followers that he would rejoin them shortly, he assumed a disguise and fled.