The fact was that the captain had had a bit of private talk with his wife and her mother, in which he gave them an inkling into the state of affairs as concerned the two young men and his eldest daughter, and requested their assistance in preventing either one from so far monopolizing the young girl as to be tempted into letting her into the secret of his feelings toward her.
They reached Pleasant Plains early in the evening, landed the cousins belonging there, with the single exception of Miss Annis Keith, then turned immediately and went down the river again, reaching the lake about the usual time for retiring to their berths.
The rest of their voyage was as delightful as that of the first day had been, and spent in a similar manner.

As they sat together on the deck, toward evening, Grace asked her father if Mackinaw had not been the scene of something interesting in history.
"There was a dreadful massacre there many years ago," he replied; "it was in 1763, by the Indians under Pontiac, an Indian chief.

It was at the time of his attack on Detroit.

There is a cave shown on the island in which the whites took refuge, but the Indians kindled a fire at its mouth and smoked them--men, women, and children--to death." "Oh, how dreadful, papa! how very dreadful!" she exclaimed.
"Yes," he said, "those were dreadful times; but often the poor Indians were really less to blame than the whites, who urged them on--the French against the English and the English against the Americans.
"Pontiac was the son of an Ojibway woman, and chief of that tribe, also of the Ottawas and the Pottawattamies, who were in alliance with the Ojibways.

In 1746 he and his warriors defended the French at Detroit against an attack by some of the northern tribes, and in 1755 he took part in their fight with Braddock, acting as the leader of the Ottawas." "I wonder," said Grace, as her father paused for a moment in his narrative, "if he was the Indian who, in that fight, aimed so many times at Washington, yet failed to hit him, and at last gave up the attempt to kill him, concluding that he must be under the special protection of the Great Spirit." "That I cannot tell," her father said.