Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters Part 14

"No, they won't. We've got to have moccasins."

Lewis scudded for the camp. In a minute he had found moccasins and had brought them. That was better. Now they might travel faster. But Lewis halted again.

"Wait. I'm going to get father a gun!"

"No, Lewis! Let's hurry. We don't want a gun."

"Yes, we do. Maybe we'll have to defend ourselves or kill meat. You wait right here."

Back Lewis scudded, a second time. He was a boy without fear. He brought a gun and ammunition. Then they hastened on. This time they had not gone far before they heard m.u.f.fled voices behind them. The Indians had wakened and were on their trail.

"Hurry!" Jacob gasped. "Run!"

"No. They'd catch us sure. Our legs are too short. You do as I say, Jakie. When they get near, we'll hide and let 'em pa.s.s us. That's the way."

They hurried, but they kept listening. At what he thought ought to be the right time--when the voices and the twig-crackings were louder--Lewis grasped Jacob's arm.

"Now! Into the brush on this side, quick! No noise!"

They hid in a good place. Not a minute later two or three of the Indians filed past, like hounds upon the trail. Lewis, clutching Jacob to keep him quiet, waited. No more Indians came. Lewis chuckled.

"We'll follow on behind, but we'll have to be watching sharp for 'em to turn back," he whispered.

So they followed their pursuers, instead of their pursuers following them. The regular Indian trick had worked finely. But even a rabbit knows enough to do that: to hide beside its trail while its hunters race on. Lewis and Jacob felt smart indeed.

They kept their eyes and ears alert. Soon they heard the Indians coming back, on the trail, as if puzzled.

"Hide," Lewis whispered.

It was done at once, by a silent dart to the left and a squatting behind bushes. Again they held their breaths. Lewis's wound throbbed and stung, but he uttered not a murmur. The Indians pa.s.sed; their keen eyes noted nothing suspicious; their sounds died away--

"All right, Jakie."

They set out once more, hastening on down the forest trail flecked by the moonlight; Lewis led, lugging the heavy gun, Jacob trotted close at his heels. Rabbits hopped and flattened, a fox or two glided, there was nothing dangerous, until--

"Listen!"

They two stopped short, and poised, heads turned. Lewis painfully stooped and put his ear to the ground.

"They're following us horseback. We'll have to hide again."

They came to a good spot, and hid. This time it was two Indians on horses, sure enough, moving rapidly to catch them. Morning was near.

The forest paled with the first tinge of dawn. They straightened up cautiously.

"I think we'd better leave this trail, Jakie," Lewis said. "We'll strike right east, for the river. We can't get lost now."

The sun rose, and they were still trudging fast, and no Indians had followed them. The Indians had been fooled nicely. About eleven o'clock they sighted the Ohio--they came out almost opposite the mouth of Wheeling Creek! Their father and Martin could not have beaten this, for a scout feat.

"There's Zane's Island!" Lewis panted. "Hooray, Jakie! There's the smoke of Wheeling settlement. We're nearly home."

He was just about worn out. For a boy of fourteen, with a big gash across his chest, and a gun to carry, and a little boy to look after, it had been a tough stunt--that fifteen-mile tramp by night and day, on an empty stomach.

"Let's yell, Lewis, so somebody'll come for us."

"No. Injuns might hear us. We'll have to make a raft. We'll find logs and tie 'em together."

They did. They found two logs, lashed them together with grape-vine, and half swimming, half paddling, launched out. Shortly after noon they landed below Wheeling, and were safe.

The people of Wheeling were much astonished to see them toil in. Long before they had reached home they were heroes. They received many compliments upon their work. And it goes without saying that there was a great ado over them in the Wetzel cabin, which had given them up for lost.

Nine years later Father Wetzel was killed by the Indians. He and a companion had been down river in a canoe, hunting and fis.h.i.+ng.

Neighbors had warned him that this was risky business, but he only laughed. Now he and his partner were paddling upstream, along sh.o.r.e, about eight miles below Wheeling. From the brush a party of Indians hailed them and ordered them to land.

"What! Surrender to you, you yaller varmints?" old man Wetzel rapped.

"Not whilst we live."

They turned the canoe and paddled fast, but the guns spoke and he received a ball through his body. He felt that he was wounded to death.

"Lie down in the bottom," he gasped. "That'll save you. I'm gone anyway, but I can get us out o' range."

He acted as target, while paddling his best. They made the opposite sh.o.r.e, at the mouth of Captina Creek, and he died at Baker's Bottom settlement, a short distance above. He was buried here. For some years a stone marked his grave. It said, only: "J. W., 1787."

At the Wetzel home the Wetzel boys vowed relentless war against all Indians. Their hatchets should never be dropped until not a redskin roamed the woods.

Lewis was now twenty-three: a borderman through and through and skilled almost beyond all others. He was not of the "long" type; instead, he was five feet eight inches; darker in complexion than his swarthy brothers, pitted with small-pox scars, broad-shouldered, thick in body, arms and legs, fiery black-eyed, and proud of his deeply black hair that when combed out fell in rippling waves to his calves.

All the brothers had long hair, black and oiled and curled. His was the longest; when not loose it formed a bunch under his fur cap.

He grew to be the most famous of the West Virginia Indian-fighters. In daring, and in trail-reading, he won first place. He practiced reloading his thirty-six-inch barreled, flint-lock patch-and-ball rifle on the run (no easy job), and by this trick out-witted many Indians who thought that they had him when his gun had been emptied. The West Virginians looked upon him as their Daniel Boone, and their "right arm of defence."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lewis Wetzel loads on the run. (From an Old Print)]

He was credited with twenty-seven scalps, on the West Virginia border, and as many more elsewhere on the frontier. His brothers swelled the number to over one hundred.

Jacob reached six feet in height, and a weight of two hundred pounds--a powerful man like Simon Kenton. He and John also were celebrated Indian-hunters. But although Lewis himself once was out-lawed by the military government for shooting an Indian needlessly, Martin was the really vindictive killer. No Indian of any kind, and whether surrendered or not, was safe from him, his rifle and his tomahawk.

Indian-hunting and Indian-killing was a business with the Wetzels, and the name "Wetzel" carried terror through the forests.

Strange to say they, like Simon Kenton and other bordermen who scorned danger, lived on to a round manhood in spite of the chances that they took. Lewis died in his bed, of a sickness, near Natchez on the southern Mississippi River, in the summer of 1808, aged forty-four.

John had died, a few years before, at Wheeling, in similar manner.

Martin and Jacob also pa.s.sed away peacefully.

Such men as the Wetzel brothers were "shock" troops. They did not occupy a country, but they broke the enemy's line.

CHAPTER VII