Adair is tantalizingly modest about his own deeds. He devotes pages to prove that an Indian rite agrees with the Book of Leviticus but only a paragraph to an exploit of courage and endurance such as that ride and swim for the Indian trade. We have to read between the lines to find the man; but he well repays the search. Briefly, incidentally, he mentions that on one trip he was captured by the French, who were so "well acquainted with the great damages I had done to them and feared others I might occasion, as to confine me a close prisoner ...in the Alebahma garrison. They were fully resolved to have sent me down to Mobile or New Orleans as a capital criminal to be hanged...BUT I DOUBTED NOT OF BEING ABLE TO EXTRICATE MYSELF SOME WAY OR OTHER. They appointed double centries over me for some days before I was to be sent down in the French King's large boat. 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. At this time Adair was trading with the Cherokees. He relates that Priber, "more effectually to answer the design of his commission...ate, drank, slept, danced, dressed, and painted himself with the Indians, so that it was not easy to distinguish him from the natives,--he married also with them, and being endued with a strong understanding and retentive memory he soon learned their dialect, and by gradual advances impressed them with a very ill opinion of the English, representing them as fraudulent, avaritious and encroaching people; he at the same time inflated the artless savages with a prodigious high opinion of their own importance in the American scale of power.... Having thus infected them...he easily formed them into a nominal republican government--crowned their old Archimagus emperor after a pleasing new savage form, and invented a variety of high-sounding titles for all the members of his imperial majesty's red court."

Priber cemented the Cherokee empire "by slow but sure degrees to the very great danger of our southern colonies." His position was that of Secretary of State and as such, with a studiedly provocative arrogance, he carried on correspondence with the British authorities. The colonial Government seems, on this occasion, to have listened to the traders and to have realized that Priber was a danger, for soldiers were sent to take him prisoner. The Cherokees, however, had so firmly "shaked hands" with their Secretary's admired discourse that they threatened to take the warpath if their beloved man were annoyed, and the soldiers went home without him--to the great hurt of English prestige. The Cherokee empire had now endured for five years and was about to rise "into a far greater state of puissance by the acquisition of the Muskohge, Chocktaw and the Western Mississippi Indians," when fortunately for the history of British colonization in America, "an accident befell the Secretary."

It is in connection with this "accident" that the reader suspects the modest but resourceful Adair of conniving with Fate. Since the military had failed and the Government dared not again employ force, other means must be found; the trader provided them. The Secretary with his Cherokee bodyguard journeyed south on his mission to the Creeks. Secure, as he supposed, he lodged overnight in an Indian town. But there a company of English traders took him into custody, along with his bundle of manuscripts presumably intended for the French commandant at Fort Alabama, and handed him over to the Governor of Georgia, who imprisoned him and kept him out of mischief till he died.