Lewis was running down the Virginia shore, keeping the ark in sight. The boy hailed them from the bank about a mile below, and was taken aboard in the skiff. He had been fired at, but was unhurt. Gist, they had little doubt, had been killed or was drowned.
In a profound gloom for his loss, the arksmen continued their voyage.
What they did not know, and could not guess, was that they left behind them another member of the crew.
Jimmy Claiborne had been floating down the river in a canoe, waiting to be picked up by the ark, when he had been captured by these same Shawnees.
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The adventure of Louis Gist was indeed a singular one. He had set his pole in the sandy bottom to help push the ark off, and he and Merrick and Kenton were pushing hard together when a bullet from one of their Indian assailants ashore broke the setting-pole between his hands, and, penetrating his deerskin jacket, struck a rib, which it also broke. But the lead was deflected, and passing half round his body beneath the skin, lodged there as a little blue lump against a rib on the other side!
The breaking of the pole and the shock caused him to pitch overboard; and, as he was but an indifferent swimmer, he would probably have drowned then and there had it not been for a strong eddy of the current at the foot of Letart’s Island. This eddy swept him round with it like a bit of flotsam, and lodged him in shallower water, amid clots of foam and driftwood.
Here his knees touched bottom and he got his head up. He thought himself mortally wounded, for the shock of the bullet directly over his heart had been heavy. Moreover, he was in great pain and bleeding considerably, and in this predicament he seemed partially or wholly to have lost consciousness.
When at length he came to himself, he had a confused impression that there had been a terrible battle, that the ark had been taken, and all his late companions killed.
By this time it had grown dusk, and he heard, or thought that he heard, the Indians on the other side of the island. The ark had already passed down the rapids and was out of sight; but Gist fancied that the redskins had towed it round to the Virginia side of the island.
