backed by his courageous soul, rushed upon Colonel Johnson to strike him from his horse, but when he had advanced within four feet Johnson, letting his horse loose, seized his pistol from his helpless left hand and fired its contents into the breast of the Indian. Being loaded with one bullet and three buckshot, at such close range and piercing the heart of the Indian, he instantly fell dead. Some said it was Tecumseh. He was certainly a great leader, and it was at this time that somebody in the battle killed Tecumseh.

The red men with amazement looked upon the sudden and unexpected death of their valiant chief. They heard no more his shouts of encouragement, saw no more the gallant wave of his hand, and with utter alarm and despair, with a great cry of disappointment, they rushed from the battlefield.

In a single instant every hope was crushed and every national aspiration perished. These children of the forest, taught by the incantations of the dead warrior's brother to believe that Tecumseh was immortal, saw him reel, fall, and die as others of the race had done. Tecumseh's eloquence had made them confident that the hated white man's advance could be stayed, and that the nation of seventeen fires could not prevail against the red man protected and led by the Great Spirit.

The youngest warrior present had listened with rapturous delight to the glorious future Tecumseh, in his fervid words, had prophesied for the Indians, and the oldest had been led by his eloquent appeals to certain assurance that no power could destroy the red men when the red men stood united in their wilderness haunts and bid these invaders defiance. Together these Indians had nursed these national dreams and racial ambitions until they had become part of their whole being. They had been taught, and their experience in many conflicts had led them to believe and conclude, that Tecumseh had been sent by the god they worshiped to lead them to a sublime destiny and to make them defenders of their race and protectors of their lands and hunting-grounds from the never-ceasing and constantly widening aggressions of their pale-face foes.

With Tecumseh dead, to them life was a bitter and unbearable burden. It had neither joy nor hope. Confident that the white man's bullet was harmless against their heroic leader, when they saw him tremble with pain, fall, then writhe and die, they read in this awful tragedy the doom of their race, the destruction of every cherished dream of success, and understood that a remorseless fate had bereft and was to destroy them.

To them nature, hitherto so beautiful, so inspiring, and so generous, had suddenly turned in bitterest cruelty and

with most malignant hate. To their tortured vision the great trees above them seemed to sway and tremble as if to fall in anger and wrath upon their defenseless heads with direful resentment. Nature to them seemed now only some wild fury bent upon their destruction and charged with their annihilation and overthrow.

In a single instant they realized that nothing was left for the Indian. Deserted by their British red-coated allies, who now fled in dismay and terror from the avenging and uplifted hand of the Kentucky Long Knives, they had no heart for battle and no courage to prolong a contest which had to them been fraught with absolute ruin.

They were not faithless, however, even in such awful gloom, to him who had led, encouraged, and directed them through so many years and in so many battles. Tenderly and reverently they lifted the warm, bleeding, and stilled body of the great chieftain into their arms; stalwart warriors became his pallbearers. With a wild, weird shout of heartbroken despair, they abandoned the battle and bore Tecumseh's body into the pathless depths of the surrounding forest, there to give him a hasty and honorable burial.

It may be that they had heard from the traditions of their fathers, who had come across the seas to inhabit a distant land, of the burial of one in the mountain whose place of sepulture was known only to the God who had

buried him, and hence resolved that the greatest of their race, he who for twenty-five years had planted in their minds plans and hopes of a magnificent kingdom which should cover the mighty, unbroken forest and hold sacred for the use of the red man a fertile soil that knew not impoverishment, and hunting grounds, the limits and the abundance of which could not be measured by even the heavens themselves, should sleep in an unknown grave.

And so, in the darkness of the night, with the sombre shade of the trees shutting out even the gleaming of the moon or the pale reflection of the stars, they walked in single file far out into the unexplored wilderness of the sylvan expanse to find a resting-place for their beloved dead.

They had done what an Indian had rarely ever done before, they left the corpses of their fellows who had fallen in the struggle to the mercy of their foes. They had violated a code of honor and war dear to them and their ancestors, and they hurried away from the scene of the fateful conflict to give the ashes of Tecumseh repose where they felt the foot of the pale-face would never tread and where his eyes would never look upon the grave of him they called "The Shooting Star," and who to them, in their simple faith, had been sent from the unseen spirit

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land to be their chieftain, their guide, and their national leader.

The dust of Tecumseh, in their loving hearts, was too sacred for the white man's view. The great warrior had loved the trees and the rivers and the waving grasses, and the silence and grandeur of their surroundings, and amid these they imagined that his departure from this world's scenes to another would best suit his noble conceptions and his grand ideas of life here and hereafter; and thus, with the rustling of the leaves in response to the tread of moccasined feet, as a requiem, they moved on amid the black darkness to a distant place in the wooded wilderness where a few of his comrades, with their tomahawks and their hands, hollowed out a grave under a widespreading monarch of the forest, which was to stand guard over the sacred spot forever, and where in the peace, and yet in the terror of the tomb, Tecumseh was to rest forever.

With skillful craft they leveled the earth; with cunning hand they laid leaves upon it so that none could find it, and unknown, unmarked, the Indian Warrior's restingplace was forever hid from the white man's search.

Persuasion, threats, rewards, promises, money, glory were all used without avail. The red man alone knew where Tecumseh was put away, and the red man died