Their suspense was not of long duration. The Indians, in a body, cautiously approached, till within a short distance; they then halted, took deliberate aim, discharged their pieces upon inanimate _logs_, gave the dreadful war-whoop, and instantly rushed forward with tomahawk and scalping-knife in hand, to dispatch the living, and obtain the scalps of the dead. As soon as they had collected in close order, more effectually to execute their horrid intentions, the party of the sargeant, with unerring aim, discharged their pieces, not on logs of wood, but perfidious savages, not one of whom escaped destruction by the snare into which they led themselves. There must have been a touch of grim humor about that sargeant as well as of cool courage. Many instances are on record of those days of danger—where either in battle or in the settlement of new countries, the cruel and crafty red-man had to be encountered—where the minds of men have been thrown from their balance by the sight of barbarities, or the suffering of afflictions, which overthrow their shuddering reasons. Some men have been called monomaniacs, from the fact of their restless and rankling hatred of the race who had inflicted some great misery upon them or theirs. But it is hardly strange that when they saw those savages behave worse than tigers, they decided to treat them like wild beasts, and that they were justified in the attempt to exterminate them. There must be men in Minnesota, at this day, who are monomaniacs on the subject of the red-skins. One of the most noted of these Indian haters was John Moredock, of Kentucky; and these are the circumstances which made him so, as given in a fine paper on the early settlers, in Harper's Magazine for 1861: Toward the end of the last century there lived at Vincennes a woman whose whole life had been spent on the frontier. She had been widowed four or five times by the Indians; her last husband, whose name was Moredock, had been killed a few years before the time of which we speak. But she had managed to bring up a large family in a respectable manner. Now, when her sons were growing up, she resolved to better their condition by moving "West." The whole of Illinois was a blooming waste of prairie land, except in a few places where stood the trading-posts built a hundred years before by the French.