Nor were danger and excitement necessarily ended with the ship's arrival in New York harbour. We were still fighting the French in Canada; men yet told grim tales of Braddock's defeat and of the horrors of Indian warfare. To him whom business or duty took far from the sea-board into the country of the savage and treacherous Iroquois, there was the ever-present probability that he would some day--perhaps many times--be compelled to fight for his life, with the certainty that, if disabled by wounds he fell into the enemy's hands, the scalp would be torn from his skull ere death could put an end to his sufferings; whilst capture meant, almost for a certainty, the being eventually put to death after undergoing the most hideous tortures that the cruelty of the Redskins could devise. To the colonists, "the only good Indian was a dead Indian"; and doubtless, by the newly-landed Andrew Kerr, the order at once to proceed up-country with a convoy in charge of military stores must have been received with somewhat mixed feelings. On the one hand, his boyish love of adventure would be amply satisfied, while, on the other, there were risks to be faced which might well have caused more than uneasiness to many an older man--risks which the boy's acquaintances possibly were at no pains to conceal, which, indeed, a few of them would probably take pleasure in painting in the gloomiest of colours. But duty was duty, and the lad had too great a share of Border stubbornness and grit to let himself be badly scared by such tales as were told to him. The destination of the convoy was Fort Detroit. In those far-off days New York was but a little city of some twenty thousand inhabitants, and the western part of New York State was quite outside the bounds of civilisation. To reach the Canadian frontier there were then two great routes of military communication--one, up the Hudson River, and so by way of Lakes George and Champlain and down the Richelieu to the St. Lawrence; the other, by the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, then by way of Lake Oneida and the Oswego River to the first of the great lakes, Lake Ontario; thence the journey to Fort Detroit would be chiefly by canoe, up Lakes Ontario and Erie. Between the last military post at the head of the Mohawk, however, and the mouth of the Oswego River, there was a great gap in which no military post had been established. Thus the route of the convoy to which Kerr was attached necessarily took them through country overrun by hostile Indian tribes. No mishap, however, befell the party; probably they were too strong, too wary and well skilled in Indian warfare, to give the enemy a chance of ambushing or taking them by surprise on their march through the woods. At Fort Detroit, it was found that a small exploring party, under a Captain Robson, was about to set out with the object of determining whether or not certain rivers and lakes were navigable, and young Kerr, boylike, eagerly volunteered to join the expedition.