THE YELLOW HUNTER THE WINDING TRAIL OF DEATH. * * * * * BY CAPT. CHAS. HOWARD. AUTHOR OF No. 50. The Wolf Queen. No. 52. The Mad Chief. No. 60. Merciless M. No. 64. The Island Trapper. No. 65. Wolf-Cap. * * * * * NEW YORK. BEADLE AND ADAMS, PUBLISHERS, 98 WILLIAM STREET. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by FRANK STARR & CO., In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. THE YELLOW HUNTER; OR, THE WINDING TRAIL OF DEATH CHAPTER I. BESIEGED. Pontiac, the Ottawa, was dead! Yes, the fearless originator of the greatest Indian conspiracy on record had received a death-blow at the hands of a fellow red-man, and the promise of a barrel of English rum had nerved the villain’s arm. The bloody deed was committed in the forest of the Illinois, not far from Cahokia, on the Mississippi, and when the base-hearted Kaskaskia fled to his clansmen, with reeking hatchet, they sided with him, and, without a word in palliation of the crime, drove Pontiac’s followers from the hamlet. The great Ottawa’s sachems spread over all the country, crying “blood for blood.” They fired many a savage heart with the torch of vengeance, and inaugurated a war whose horrors stand without a parallel on the pages of American history. From the bays and rivers that relieve the vast dreary western shore of Lake Michigan, rushed the Sacs, Foxes and Menomonies, to assist in the extirpation of the Illinois and the hated English who dwelt in the neighborhood where the conspirator was assassinated. Out from among the stately pines that cover that mighty peninsula between Huron and her western sister, came the intractable Ojibwa, the giant Ottawa, and the proverbially treacherous but brave Pottawatomie; and being joined on the Wabash by the Wyandots, the Miamies, and other more eastern tribes, they swooped down upon the Eden land that bordered the Father of Waters. Their motto was, ‘Death to the unprotected English and the Illinois Indians, but life to every Frenchman!’ Before the war that followed, all other Indian conflicts sink into utter insignificance, and over the grave of Pontiac more blood was poured out in atonement than flowed from the hecatombs of slaughtered heroes on the corpse of Patroclus: And through the dark and bloody labyrinths of that era of death, the reader is about to follow the fortunes of red and white--fortunes which pale the cheek and almost turn the blood to ice. * * * * * “Father should have been here ere this. He said he would return at sunset. I wonder what keeps him. Surely no danger has befallen him. No, I know he can not be far away, and I will run toward the creek and meet him.” The speaker was a beautiful girl about eighteen years of age, and, as she uttered the last word, she bounded across the threshold of a low-browed cottage, and hurried toward the south.