He never betrayed the anxiety for his wife and children that constantly tormented him, for fear of rousing the suspicions of the Indians; but when he reached Old Chillicothe, and found a large party painted and ready to take the warpath in a new attack upon Boones-borough, he could bear it no longer. He showed no sign of his misery, however; he joined the Indians in all their sports as before, but he was always watching for some chance to escape, and one morning in the middle of June he stole away from his captors. He made his way a hundred and sixty miles through the woods, and on the ninth day entered Boonesborough, faint with the fast which he had broken but once in his long flight, to find that he had been given up for dead and his family had gone back to North Carolina. Boone spent the rest of his days fighting wild men and hunting wild beasts in Kentucky, until both were well-nigh gone and the tamer life of civilization pressed closer about him. Then he set out for Missouri, where he found himself again in the wilderness, and dwelt there in his beloved solitude till he died. Nothing ever moved him so much as the memoir which a young man wrote down for him and had printed. He was fond of having it read to him (for he could not read any more than he could write), and he would cry out in delight over it, “All true; not a lie in it!” But it is recorded that he once allowed himself to be so far excited by the heroic behavior of a friend who had saved his life in an Indian fight, at the risk of his own, as to say, “You behaved like a man, that time.”