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.