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."* 
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.** 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 wound, 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 
* See Chapter V, p. 88. 
*«The Prairie,” Ornithological Biography, vol. i, p. 81. 
