This horse was a thoroughbred, the same one that Mrs. Heald, as a bride, had ridden from Kentucky a year before. The Indians had always looked on it with envious eyes, and had employed all means, lawful and otherwise, to get it from the fort. Now it was theirs by conquest, and no later efforts availed to recover it. Doubtless among its new owners its fate was hard and its life short. One winter of starvation, exposure and abuse would "hang its hide on the fence," even while its wretched Indian-pony companions were living on in stubborn endurance. It turned out afterwards that the Indians took their booty down to Peoria, to sell and "trade" for whisky, and it found its way quickly to St. Louis, where Colonel O'Fallon recognized a great deal as belonging to the Healds, and redeemed it and sent it to Colonel Samuel Wells at the Falls of the Ohio [Louisville] as a memento of his daughter and her husband, both supposed to be dead. It reached there before the Healds did, and the articles are now in possession of the family; most of them were shown by Hon. Darius Heald in Chicago, in 1892, when the before-mentioned short-hand transcript of his mother's story was made, and he and his precious relics were photographed, making a picture hereinafter presented. (See Appendix E.) The Indian who led Captain Heald down to the camp and claimed him as his prisoner, was a half-breed named Chandonnais. He afterward found that Mrs. Heald was still alive, and, it is supposed, ransomed her from her captor; for, on the morning of the sixteenth, he brought the husband and wife together. He seems to have connived at the escape of both, for they found the matter wonderfully easy--boat and escort at hand and all oversight withdrawn. Years afterward, in 1831, Chandonnais visited the Healds at their home, near O'Fallon, Missouri, and Darius Heald remembers his father's meeting and greeting the brave who had so nobly rescued them. It is thought that the Indians went off down the lake to have "a general frolic"--in other words, torture to death the wounded prisoners. Here arises before the mind's eye the dim and cloudy vision of horror, the acme of the tragedy, all the more appalling for its shrouding mystery. It makes the flesh creep and the hair stand on end. It sears the heart against the race whereof it was the inborn nature to feel in the eyes a love for the sight of mortal agony, in the ears an eagerness for the shriek of despairing anguish. The wounded not included! The helpless picked out for torture! The inflamed hurts to be deepened with a pitchfork and perhaps further and mortally inflamed with a burning brand! Kindly Nature's passing lethargy to be quickened into conscious death in frantic anguish!