Besides, he must hurry to warn the American camp. His heart burned hot as he thought of the fatuous fool who slept far from his men, who scoffed at warnings, who neglected the commonest precautions for defense. Swift as prudence would allow he sped through the Indian camp to where Rogers and Cato waited, and together the three raced southward and westward, hoping against hope that they would yet be in time, hoping till the far-off rattle of rifles rose and fell and died away, till red flames crimsoned the sky, and the yells of exultant savages sounded across the snow and the ice. Then, hopeless, the three circled south and took the trail back to the Maumee, bearing to General Harrison the fateful news that General Winchester’s army was no more. This much Jack knew and told. He could not know, what the world has since learned, that Winchester, waking to the yells of the foe as they hurled themselves upon his defenseless camp, tried too late to join his sleeping soldiers and was captured by the Indians and taken before General Proctor. He could not know that Winchester, overborne by Proctor’s threat that he feared he would not be able to restrain the fury of his savages if the Americans continued to resist, thrice sent an order of surrender to Major Madison and the men who were bravely holding out behind a barricade of garden pickets. He could not know that at the third order Madison had surrendered on pledges of protection from Proctor himself--pledges that the British general promptly forgot, abandoning the wounded and the dying to the vengeance of his savage allies--abandoning more than three hundred men, unarmed and defenseless, to be tomahawked in cold blood or to be burned alive in the building that had been hurriedly transformed into a hospital. He could not know that six hundred more had been carried away as prisoners, and that of the thousand jubilant men who had thought to march on Amherstburg and Detroit on the morrow only thirty-three escaped. CHAPTER XXII BEFORE Jack again approached Fort Malden six months had passed away--six months of winter, of budding spring, of golden summer. When General Winchester’s army perished winter was nearing its end; when at last the tide of war changed and began to flow northward summer had died on a bed of scarlet and gold and autumn winds were driving the rustling leaves through the whispering woods. During those six months even Jack, desperate as he was, had not dared to run the cordon of foes that lay between him and his desires. Not till Perry had swept the British from Lake Erie and Harrison sailed with five thousand men for Canada could he once more set about his quest.