Page:Enterprise and Adventure.djvu/45

29 permitted me to look up, I saw, at a distance, a canoe, with four men, coming towards me, and waited in confidence to hear the sound of their paddles; but in this I was disappointed. The men, as I afterwards learned, were Indians, who, happening to fall in with one of the passenger's trunks, picked it up, and returned to the shore for the purpose of pillaging it, leaving, as they since acknowledged, the man on the boat to his fate. Indeed, I am certain I should have had more to fear from their avarice, than to hope from their humanity; and it is more than probable that my life would have been taken, to secure them in the possession of my watch and several coins which I had about me."

The accident happened at eight o'clock in the morning; in the course of some hours, as the day advanced, the sun grew warmer, the wind blew from the south, and the water became calmer. The shipwrecked man then got upon his knees, and found himself in the small lake of St. Louis, which is about three to five miles wide, and with which he happened to be familiar. With some difficulty he got upon his feet, but was soon convinced, by cramps and spasms in all his sinews, that he was incapable of swimming any great distance, and he was then two miles from the shore. He was now going, he thought, with wind and current, to destruction; and though cold, hungry, and fatigued, was obliged again to sit down to rest, when an extraordinary circumstance greatly relieved him.

On examining the wreck, to see if it were possible to detach any part of it by which to steer, he perceived something loose entangled in a fork of the wreck, and so carried along. This he found to be a