The few musicians play a funeral march, and the procession moves apprehensively, though it moves steadily, for there are brave men in the ranks, men who will not flinch, though they rage at the evil folly to which they have been driven. They do not doubt the issue, though they face it. They have not long to wait. The bushes which fringe the rising ground do not conceal the shifting enemy. The marching column huddles. There are sharp commands and the reports of muskets. The Indians are attacking. The massacre has begun! Hampered, unsheltered, outnumbered by a vengeful host, the whites must die. The men die fighting, as men in such straits should. The Indians are close upon the women and children in the wagon. Into one of them, that which contains the hunter's child, leaps a savage, in whose beady eyes are all cruelty and ferocity. His tomahawk sinks into the brain of the nearest helpless one, and at the same instant, swift as an otter gliding into water, the boy is out and darting away among the bushes. Oddly enough he is unnoticed--a remnant of the soldiers are dying hardly--and he escapes to where the bushes are more dense. About a cottonwood tree in the distance appears greater covert. Around the tree has been part of the struggle, but the ghastly tide has passed, and there are only dead men there. The boy is in mortal terror, but his instinct does not fail him. There is a heap of brush, the top of some tree felled by a storm, and beneath the mass he writhes and wriggles and is lost from view. There is a rush of returning footsteps; there is a clamor of many Indian voices about the brush-heap, but the boy is undiscovered. The savages are not seeking him. They count all the whites as slain or captured, and are now but intent on plunder. Night falls. The child slips from his hiding place, and runs to the southward. Suddenly a dark figure rises in his path, and the grasp of a strong hand is upon his shoulder. He struggles frantically, but only for a moment. His own language is spoken. It is in the voice of a friendly Miami fleeing, like the boy, from the Pottowatomies. The Indian takes the boy by the hand, and hurries him to the westward, to the Mississippi. It is the year 1835. One of a band of trappers venturing up the Missouri is a slender, quiet man, the deadliest shot in the party. Good trapper he is, but the fame he has earned among adventurers of his class is not from fur-getting. He is a lonely man, but a creature of action. He never seeks to avoid the Indian trails. Cautious and crafty he is, certainly, but he follows closely the westward drift of the red men, and when opportunity comes he spares not at all. He is a hunter of Indians, vengeance personified. He is the boy who hid beneath the brush-heap; the memory of that awful day and night is ever with him, and he seeks blindly to make the equation just. To his single arm have fallen more savages than fell whites on the day of the massacre by the lake. Still he moves westward.