nt volley.
Every family had its lost ones,—"My father, my
mother, my wife, my child, they slaughtered, burned, tortured,—I
will hunt the Indian till I die!"
Detroit, Niagara, Michilimackinac—the very names meant horror, for there let loose, the red bloodhounds of war, the most savage, the most awful, with glittering knives, pressed close along the Ohio. The buffalo meat for the expedition rotted while Clark struggled, anguished in spirit, a lion chained, "Stationed here to repel a few predatory savages when I would carry war to the Lakes."
But troops yet behind, "almost naked for want of linen and entirely without shoes," were trying to join Clark down the wild Ohio. Joseph Brandt cut them off,—Lochry and Shannon and one hundred Pennsylvanians,—not one escaped to tell the tale.
Clark never recovered, never forgot the fate of Lochry. "Had I tarried but one day I might have saved them!" In the night-time he seemed to hear those struggling captives dragged away to Detroit,—"Detroit! lost for the want of a few men!" For the first time the over-wrought hero gave way to intoxication to drown his grief,—and so had Clark then died, "Detroit" might have been found written on his heart.
Despair swept over Westmoreland where Lochry's men were the flower of the frontier. Only fourteen or fifteen rifles remained in Hannastown,—the Indians swooped and destroyed it utterly.
XVIII
ON THE RAMPARTS
In all his anguish about Detroit, with the energy of desperation Clark now set to work making Louisville stronger than ever.
"Boys, we must have defences absolutely impr
