At a late hour next day Kaskaskia presented a strange sight. Not a single house was open, every window and door was closely fastened, the very beasts remained bolted in their stables, and a grim-looking patrol of mounted borderers rode up and down the echoing streets, with cocked rifles.

A town of fifteen hundred inhabitants was trembling with abject terror before a force of some two hundred resolute men, who had captured it without shedding a drop of blood, by the pure moral influence of fear.

The main body of the invaders lay at the edge of the town, by their bivouac fires, which burned brightly at the expense of all the neighboring fences. There was bluff Simon Kenton, who had left his old friend Boone in Kentucky, to share the perils and glories of the Kaskaskia expedition, and who was lolling on his back, laughing over the night’s adventures to a group of borderers.

[64]

“Golly, Bill,” said he, to Harrod, who was devouring a huge chunk of corn-bread with great relish, “how them French Britishers do skeer, to be sure! I b’lieve ef we’d axed them fur all thar money last night, instead of their shootin’-irons, they’d ’a’ guv it jest as easy.”

“Don’t you b’lieve it, Sime,” said Harrod, dryly. “It takes a powerful skeer to git a feller’s money. But, Gosh, boys, that thar little cuss of a adjutant of ours, he did fly round amazin’ last night. Jest like a bug on a hot griddle, he war. And ef it hadn’t b’en fur him, Lord knows ef we’d ’a’ tuk the fort at all.”

“Who is that adjutant?” inquired Major Bowman, who was sitting close by them, in republican simplicity, guiltless of military etiquette when off duty. “I never saw him in Kentucky; but he seems to be a great favorite with Clark.”

“He’s some relation of Governor Henry’s,” said Captain Helm, a stout, jolly, red-faced officer from Virginia. “Clark told me he brought a letter from Henry to him, which asked him, as a personal favor, to make Frank his adjutant. The colonel hesitated, on account of the lad’s being so young, but I must say, gentlemen, I don’t ever remember seeing a smarter officer of his inches.”

“Thar’s the little cuss now,” cried Harrod, laughing, as the little officer rode out of a by street and came up to the bivouac. “I tell you, gentlemen, he are gritty, if he are small. Don’t he sit his hoss pritty? Gosh, if he war only a gal, wouldn’t he make a reg’lar ringtailed snorter! I c’u’d hug him myself.”

“He are pretty ’nuff fur a gal, that’s as true as Gospel, boys,” said Kenton, meditatively. “But, no gal c’u’d dash around the way he does; and he’s got the grit of a dozen wildcats.”

Here little Frank galloped up, on a very handsome mustang, which he rode in among the recumbent borderers with delicious coolness, causing them to tumble out of the way in a terrible hurry.

Had any one else in the command done such a thing, he would have been plucked off his animal and soundly beaten in a twinkling; but the little adjutant and his pony were[65] general favorites, and seemed able to go anywhere, without offense.

“Well, Bowman,” cried the youngster, gayly, “your men are not good for much to search for arms, after all. Here’s a building, not fifty feet from your bivouac, with twelve Indians in it, every man fully armed and in his war-paint.”

“Oh, nonsense, Frank,” said the major, disbelieving him; “how could that be, and we not know it?”

“Ah, major, you’re not supposed to know every thing,” said the boy, saucily. “I heard all about it last night, but I didn’t want our stupid-heads to know it; for you couldn’t disarm those fellows in a hurry.”

“Are you serious, Frank?”

“Never more so.”

The adjutant pointed to a large building near the government house, the identical one in which Ruby Roland and her red escort had been quartered the night before. The doors and windows were shut, and there was no appearance that the place............