282 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



motive to deceive than in the case of his own father, to 

 whom his imagination had added nearly half a foot in 

 stature. 13 



When Audubon was returning from Ste. Gene- 

 vieve in the spring of 1812, an incident occurred in 

 which, for the first time in the course of his wanderings 

 for upwards of twenty-five years, he felt his life to be 

 in danger from his fellow man. 14 Overtaken by night 

 on the prairie, he approached the hearth fire of a small 

 log cabin, which at first was mistaken for the campfire 

 of some wandering Indians. On craving shelter, he 

 was admitted by a tall, surly woman in coarse attire, 

 who displayed both an evil eye and a repellent counte- 

 nance; but she offered him a supper of venison and 

 jerked buffalo meat and bade him to make his bed upon 

 the floor. When she espied his gold watch and chain, 

 her demeanor suddenly changed and she asked to take 

 them in her hand ; she put the chain around her brawny 

 neck and by her manner betrayed every token of cov- 

 etous desire. Meanwhile, a young Indian stoic, who 

 was nursing a recent arrow w T ound, had been sitting in 

 silence by the fire ; though he spoke not a word, he cast 

 an expressive glance in Audubon's direction whenever 

 the woman's back was turned, and having drawn his 

 knife from its scabbard, expressed in pantomime what 

 the confiding stranger might eventually expect. 



Audubon's suspicions were at last thoroughly 

 aroused. He asked for his watch, and under pretense 

 of forecasting the weather, took up his gun and saun- 

 tered out of the cabin ; in the darkness outside he slipped 

 a ball in each of the barrels of his gun, scraped the edges 

 of his flints, renewed the primings, and returned with a 



13 See Chapter V, p. 88. 



14 "The Prairie," Ornithological Biography, vol. i, p. 81. 



