The ruins of the fort stood ten feet above the water, on the high point between the Maumee and the Auglaize. Mounting the gentle slope that led upward from the west the travellers descended into a wide half-filled ditch and then climbed a steep glacis of sloping earth that had encircled the ancient palisades. The logs and fascines that had held the ramparts in place had long since rotted away and most of the inner lines of palisades had disappeared. Within their former bounds a few scorched and blackened logs marked where the four blockhouses had stood. The narrow ditch that cut the eastern wall and ran down to the edge of the river--the ditch dug to enable Wayne’s soldiers to get water unseen by lurking foes--was half filled by sliding earth. Mounting the crumbling ramparts Jack and Alagwa stood and stared, striving to picture the scene as it was in the days already ancient when the United States flag had flown for the first time in the valley of the Maumee. For two or three hundred yards on all sides the forest trees had been cut away and their places had been taken by a light growth of maple and scrub oak. On the south, on the west bank of the Auglaize, a single mighty oak towered heavenward--the council tree of all the northern tribes, the tree beneath which fifty years before Pontiac had mustered the greatest Indian council known in all America and had welded the tribes together for his desperate but vain assault upon the growing power of the white men--an assault which Tecumseh was even then striving to emulate. Beyond the council oak, southward along the Auglaize, stretched an apple orchard planted years before by the indefatigable “Appleseed Johnny.” To the north, beyond the Maumee, stood a single apple tree, a mammoth of its kind, ancient already and destined to live and bear for eighty years to come. To the west, along the road down which the three had come, black spots showed where George Ironside’s store had stood, where Perault, the baker, had baked and traded, where McKenzie, the Scot, had made silver ornaments at a stiff price for the aborigines, where Henry Ball and his wife, taken prisoners at St. Claire’s defeat, had won their captors’ good will and saved their lives by working, he as a boatman and she by washing and sewing. Near at hand, but out of sight from the fort, was the house of James Girty, brother of Simon, where British agents from Canada had continually come to fan the discontent of the Indians against the Americans. Up and down the rivers stretches of weeds and underbrush choked the ground where Wayne had found vast fields of enormous corn. Alagwa’s heart burned hotly as she remembered that her people and those of kindred tribes had tilled those fields for centuries before the white man had come into the Ohio country. The fortunes of war had laid them waste. Silently she prayed that the fortunes of war might yet restore them!