How long he remained thus concealed he never knew; but at length, as the sun was setting, the Indians departed, and John Moredock stepped forth from his hiding-place, not what he had entered it, a brave, light-hearted lad of nineteen, the pride of a large family circle and the favorite of a whole little colony of borderers, but an orphan and an utter stranger in a strange land, standing alone amidst the ghastly and disfigured corpses of his family and friends. He had hoped to find some life still lingering amidst the heaps of carnage; but all, all had perished. Having satisfied himself of this fact, the lonely boy—now transformed into that most fearful of all beings, a thoroughly desperate man—quitted the place, and, guiding himself by the stars, struck across the prairie toward the nearest settlement on the Kaskaskia, where he arrived the next morning, bringing to the inhabitants the first news of the massacre which had taken place so near their own village, and the first warning of the near approach of the prowling band which had been for several months depredating, at various points along that exposed frontier, in spite of the treaties lately made by their nations with the Federal Government. John Moredock was by nature formed for a leader in times of danger, and his avowed determination to revenge the massacre of his friends and kindred by the extirpation of the murderous band coincided so exactly with the feelings of the frontiersmen, that, in spite of his lack of previous acquaintance, he in a few days found himself at the head of a company of twenty-five or thirty young men, whose lives had been spent in the midst of all kinds of perils and hardships, and who now bound themselves to their leader by an oath never to give up the pursuit until the last one of the marauding band engaged in the attack at Grand Tower should be slain. Stanch as a pack of blood-hounds this little company of avengers ranged the frontier from the Des Moines to the Ohio, now almost within reach of their victims, and now losing all trace of them on the boundless prairies over which they roamed, unconscious of the doom by which they were being so hotly but stealthily pursued. Once, indeed, the whites came up with their game on the banks of a tributary of the Missouri, a hundred and fifty miles beyond the utmost line of the settlements; but as the Indians, though unsuspicious of any particular danger, had pitched their camp in a spot at once easy to defend and to escape from, and as Moredock wished to destroy and not to disperse them, he forbore striking a partial blow, and resolved rather to postpone his revenge than to enjoy it incompletely.