Fortune, however, seemed to repay him for this act of self-restraint by presenting the very opportunity he had sought, when, a few weeks afterward, he discovered the whole gang of marauders encamped for the night on a small island in the middle of the Mississippi. After a hasty consultation with his companions, a course of procedure was determined upon which strikingly displays both the monomaniacal tendency of the leader and the desperate ascendancy he had acquired over his followers. This was nothing less than to shut themselves up on that narrow sand-bar and to engage the savages in a hand-to-hand conflict—a conflict from which neither party could retreat, and which must necessarily end in the total destruction of one or the other. A most desperate undertaking truly, when we reflect that the numbers of the combatants were about equal, and that to surprise an Indian encampment was next to impossible. But John Moredock, and, probably, more than one of his companions, were monomaniacs, and considerations of personal danger never entered into their calculations. Revenge, not safety, was their object, and they took little thought of the latter when the opportunity of compassing the former was presented. Slowly and stealthily, therefore, the canoes approached the island when all sounds there had ceased, and the flame of the camp-fire had sunk into a pale-red glow, barely marking the position of the doomed party among the undergrowth with which the central portion of the little isle was covered. The Indians, confiding in their natural watchfulness, seldom place sentinels around their camps; and thus Moredock and his band reached the island without being discovered. A few moments sufficed to set their own canoes as well as those of the Indians adrift, and then, with gun in hand and tomahawk ready, they glided noiselessly, as so many panthers, into the thicket, separating as they advanced so as to approach the camp from different quarters. All remained still as death for many minutes while the assailants were thus closing in around their prey, and not a twig snapped, and scarcely a leaf stirred in the thick jungle through which thirty armed men were making their way in as many different directions, but all converging toward the same point, where a pale glimmer indicated the position of the unsuspected savages. But though an Indian camp may be easily approached within a certain distance, it is almost impossible, if there be any considerable number of them, to actually strike its occupants while asleep. As savages, roaming at large over the face of the continent without fixed habitations, and relying upon chance for the supply of their few wants, they know nothing of that regularity of habit which devotes certain fixed portions of time to the various purposes of life, but each one eats, sleeps or watches, just as his own feelings may dictate at the moment, without any regard to established usages of time or place. Hence