They advanced, Wells and his escort getting about a quarter of a mile ahead, and were jogging along quietly when all at once they halted, and he turned back and got down pretty close to Captain Heald--perhaps half the distance. He pulled off his hat and swung it around his head once or twice, making a circle. As soon as he saw Wells coming back, Captain Heald said to his wife: "Uncle sees something ahead of him there. There is something wrong." And when he made the circle around his head, Mrs. Heald understood the sign, "We are surrounded by Indians." Captain Wells soon got close enough to shout "We are surrounded by Indians. March up on the sand-ridges. There are sand-ridges we ought to get in behind where we can stand half up and not be seen." Then she saw the Indians' heads "sticking up and down again, here and there, like turtles out of the water." They marched up on the sand-ridges, the wagons being put back next to the lake and the men taking position in front of them. Captain Wells shouted to Captain Heald, "Charge them!" and then led on and broke the ranks of the Indians, who scattered right and left. He then whirled round and charged to the left. This move brought them well out into the country, and they marched onward and took position about two or three hundred yards in front of the wagons and a like distance from the Indians. Captain Heald rather gave way to Captain Wells, knowing his superior excellence in Indian warfare, Wells having been trained from childhood by such warriors as Little Turtle, Tecumseh and Black Hawk; especially by the first two. Here to the eye of common-sense, whether soldierly or civilian, the battle is already gone--lost beyond salvation. The onus of blame appears to rest on poor Wells, the brave, devoted volunteer. He had learned war in a school that took no account of the supply-train; in the school of individual fighters, living on nothing, saving no wounded or non-combatants; dash, scurry, kill, scalp and run away, every man for himself--and the devil take the hindmost--in other words the Indian system. As to this band of whites, what had it to fight for but its train of wagons with all the helpless ones, all the stores, all the ammunition, all the means of progress and of caring for the wounded? To charge the centre of a brave, unformed rabble which outflanks you is only heroic suicide at best, and when the doing so leaves the train at the mercy of the spreading flanks of the foe, it is fatal madness. To return to the Heald narrative: