The road led through the Black Swamp, that great morass of water-soaked quagmire that covered all northwestern Ohio, stretching forty miles from north to south and one hundred and twenty miles from east to west, from Fort Wayne to the Cuyahoga and the Western Reserve. All over it giant trees soared heavenward, springing from sunlight-starved ground on which no undergrowth could root. Between lay fallen limbs and rotting tree trunks, thick water-soaked moss, and carpets of moldering leaves, layer upon layer. No one that once crossed it ever forgot the treacherous quicksands that hid beneath the blighted plants, the crumbling logs half sunk in shiny pools where copperheads lay in wait, the low-hung branches that dripped moisture to the stunted vegetation, the clouds of venomous mosquitoes, the brilliant flies that clustered upon the dead even before it was dead, the labyrinths of tortuous runways. Except at midday no ray of sunlight ever penetrated the canopy of interlaced branches that arched overhead and that, to a soaring bird, must have looked as solid and unbroken as a grassy field. Underfoot the ground was spongy with standing water that moved sluggishly, if at all, through creeks and rivers almost level with the surface. Shallow pools, alive with water-snakes, were everywhere. A few roads, so-called, ran through this swamp. Mad Anthony Wayne had chopped a way through it from Greenville to Fort Defiance, what time he crushed the Miamis’ pride and retrieved Harmer’s and St. Clair’s defeats. Hull and his army were even then carving another road through it from Urbana to Detroit and disgrace and defeat. A third road, little more than a trail, followed down the Auglaize. Across these north-south passways ran the east-west road that Jack was following down the St. Marys, from Girty’s Town to Fort Wayne. The road was not much of a road. Rather, it was an Indian trail, broadened by white men, who had hewed down the great trees that had stood along it, making a rutted stump-encumbered mudhole-filled passage, through which a wagon must move slowly and perilously. Once started along it the teamster must go on. There was no place to turn aside and few places when it was possible to turn back. Jack had no thought of turning back. He was pressing forward with feverish haste. Fort Wayne was eighty miles way--a four days’ journey which Jack hoped to make in three. He was wild to seek his kinswoman before it was too late. But he could not shirk his self-appointed task. The departure of Tecumseh and his braves for the north to join the British warned him anew that war was imminent and that ammunition might be sorely needed in the fort. As a matter of fact war had already been declared and couriers were speeding north, west, and south from Washington bearing the news. One was about to find General Hull at Fort Findlay, which he had just built in the middle of the Black Swamp.