Another charge was made which enabled Captain Wells to get a little closer to the Indians. He had two pistols and a small gun. His bullets and powder were kept in shoulder belts, hung at convenient places, and he generally had an extra bullet in his mouth, which helped him to load fast when necessary. He could pour in a little powder, wad it down, "blow in" the bullet, prime and fire more quickly than one can tell the facts. The Indians broke from him right and left. The hottest part of the battle lasted but a few minutes, but Captain Heald's little band was cut down. He gave the signal for surrender; the chiefs came together and they made a compromise. By this time Wells, Ronan and Van Vorhees were killed, Heald had a bullet in his hip, Mrs. Heald had a half dozen wounds, half the regulars were killed or wounded, and so far as we now know for certain, all twelve militia-men. (A doubt about this last named unexplained mortality, and suggestion as to the probable manner of their death, will be noted later.) Darius Heald could only say: Afterwards, in talking the matter over, Captain Nathan Heald said that he had no confidence in the Indians, but that he had done the best he could do; that in fifteen minutes more the last man would have been killed, as they had no chance at all; his men were falling rapidly, and he himself was wounded in the hip by a one-ounce ball. That ball was never extracted, and caused his death twenty years afterward. In any circumstances, one cannot cast blame on a beaten commander, negotiating with his victorious foes, while bleeding from a bullet deep-bedded in his hip-joint. In this case, it is not likely that blame would be due, even if Captain Heald had been unhurt. But for his surrender, the Chicago Massacre would have been, on a small scale, the fore-runner of the great Custer slaughter, where not a white man lived to tell the tale. Every man, woman and child of white blood (except perhaps the Kinzies and Lieutenant Helm), would now be in oblivion almost as if they had never been born. Even the "massacre tree" that stands to-day (1893) in Eighteenth street near the lake, in gaunt, leafless old age, could only have been identified by the bleaching skulls, great and small, which surrounded it when General Cass passed the spot a few years afterward. Here we take up again Mrs. Heald's personal story: