They were strongly charged against laying down their
weapons or suffering any hostile thing to be in the place where I
was kept, as they deemed me capable of any mischief.... About an
hour before we were to set off by water I escaped from them by
land.... I took through the middle of the low land covered
with briers at full speed. I heard the French clattering on
horseback along the path...and the howling savages pursuing...,
but MY USUAL GOOD FORTUNE enabled me to leave them far
enough behind...."
One feels that a few of the pages given up to Leviticus might
well have been devoted to a detailed account of this escape from
"double centries" and a fortified garrison, and the plunge
through the tangled wilds, by a man without gun or knife or
supplies, and who for days dared not show himself upon the trail.
There is too much of "my usual good fortune" in Adair's
narrative; such luck as his argues for extraordinary resources in
the man. Sometimes we discover only through one phrase on a page
that he must himself have been the hero of an event he relates in
the third person. This seems to be the case in the affair of
Priber, which was the worst of those "damages" Adair did to the
French. Priber was "a gentleman of curious and speculative
temper" sent by the French in 1786 to Great Telliko to win the
Cherokees to their interest.
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