Our red admirers halted almost at the muzzle of the gun and the blades
of my brothers' axes. Luckily the Indians had neither firearms nor
bows and arrows. They made rushes occasionally, but the shotgun
wounded several, the axes intimidated, and they seemed about to settle
down to a siege when, with a tremendous shouting and singing of
"Tippecanoe and Tyler too," a band of picturesquely arrayed white men
came marching along the trail. The enemy took to their heels, and we
learned that our rescuers had been to a William Henry Harrison parade
and barbecue, for this was the time of the famous "hard cider"
campaign.
The Indians had been there too and, filling up with "fire water,"
their former war-path proclivities had returned to their "empty,
swept, and garnished" minds, to the extent that they yearned to
decorate their belts with our scalps.
Our preservers scattered to their homes, and the would-be scalpers
were seen no more, leaving the world to darkness and to us in the
woods. The woods, where Adam and Eve lived and loved, where Pan
piped, and Satyrs danced, the opera house of birds; the woods, green,
imparadisaical, mystic, tranquillizing--to the poet perhaps when all
is well--but to us, they seemed haunted by spirits of evil, the yells
of the demons seemed to echo and reecho; but an indefinable something
seemed to sympathize with the infinite pathos of our lives, and at
last sleep, "the brother of death," folded us in his arms, and the
curtain fell.
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