To lie the night on adamant, pierced by the needles of the frost; to
awake shivering and famished, until the meaning of an inch of ice on
the backwater comes to your mind,--these are not calculated to put a man
into an equable mood to listen to oratory. Nevertheless there was a
kind of oratory to fit the case. To picture the misery of these men
is well-nigh impossible. They stood sluggishly in groups, dazed by
suffering, and their faces were drawn and their eyes ringed, their
beards and hair matted. And many found it in their hearts to curse Clark
and that government for which he fought.
When the red fire of the sun glowed through the bare branches that
morning, it seemed as if the campaign had spent itself like an arrow
which drops at the foot of the mark. Could life and interest and
enthusiasm be infused again in such as these? I have ceased to marvel
how it was done. A man no less haggard than the rest, but with a
compelling force in his eyes, pointed with a blade to the hills across
the river. They must get to them, he said, and their troubles would be
ended. He said more, and they cheered him. These are the bare facts. He
picked a man here, and another there, and these went silently to a grim
duty behind the regiment.
“If any try to go back, shoot them down!” he cried.
Then with a gun-butt he shattered the ice and was the first to leap
into the water under it. They followed, some with a cheer that was most
pitiful of all. They followed him blindly, as men go to torture, but
they followed him, and the splashing and crushing of the ice were sounds
to freeze my body. I was put in a canoe. In my day I have beheld great
suffering and hardship, and none of it compared to this. Torn with pity,
I saw them reeling through the water, now grasping trees and bushes
to try to keep their feet, the strongest breaking the way ahead and
supporting the weak between them. More than once Clark himself tottered
where he beat the ice at the apex of the line. Some swooned and would
have drowned had they not been dragged across the canoe and chafed back
to consciousness. By inches the water shallowed. Clark reached the high
ground, and then Bill Cowan, with a man on each shoulder. Then others
endured to the shallows to fall heavily in the crumbled ice and be
dragged out before they died. But at length, by God’s grace, the whole
regiment was on the land. Fires would not revive some, but Clark himself
seized a fainting man by the arms and walked him up and down in the
sunlight until his blood ran again.
It was a glorious day, a day when the sap ran in the maples, and the sun
soared upwards in a sky of the palest blue. All this we saw through the
tracery of the leafless branches,--a mirthless, shivering crowd, crept
through a hell of weather into the Hair Buyer’s very lair. Had he
neither heard nor seen?
Down the steel-blue lane of water between the ice came a canoe. Our
stunted senses perceived it, unresponsive. A man cried out (it was Tom
McChesney); now some of them had leaped into the pirogue, now they were
returning. In the towed canoe two fat and stolid squaws and a pappoose
were huddled, and beside them--God be praised!--food. A piece of buffalo
on its way to town, and in the end compartment of the boat tallow
and bear’s grease lay revealed by two blows of the tomahawk. The
kettles--long disused--were fetched, and broth made and fed in sips to
the weakest, while the strongest looked on and smiled in an agony of
self-restraint. It was a fearful thing to see men whose legs had refused
service struggle to their feet when they had drunk the steaming, greasy
mixture. And the Colonel, standing by the river’s edge, turned his face
away--down-stream. And then, as often, I saw the other side of the man.
Suddenly he looked at me, standing wistful at his side.
“They have cursed me,” said he, by way of a question, “they have cursed
me every day.” And seeing me silent, he insisted, “Tell me, is it not
so, Davy?”
“It is so,” I said, wondering that he should pry, “but it was while they
suffered. And--and some refrained.”
“And you?” he asked queerly.
“I--I could not, sir. For I asked leave to come.”
“If they have condemned me to a thousand hells,” said he,
dispassionately, “I should not blame them.” Again he looked at me. “Do
you understand what you have done?” he asked.
“No, sir,” I said uneasily.
“And yet there are some human qualities in you, Davy. You have been
worth more to me than another regiment.”
I stared.
“When you grow older, if you ever do, tell your children that once upon
a time you put a hundred men to shame. It is no small thing.”
Seeing him relapse into silence, I did not speak. For the space of half
an hour he stared down the river, and I knew that he was looking vainly
for the Willing.
At noon we crossed, piecemeal, a deep lake in the canoes, and marching
awhile came to a timber-covered rise which our French prisoners named
as the Warriors’ Island. And from the shelter of its trees we saw the
steely lines of a score of low ponds, and over the tops of as many
ridges a huddle of brown houses on the higher ground.
And this was the place we had all but sold our lives to behold! This was
Vincennes at last! We were on the heights behind the town,--we were at
the back door, as it were. At the far side, on the Wabash River, was the
front door, or Fort Sackville, where the banner of England snapped in
the February breeze.
We stood there, looking, as the afternoon light flooded the plain.
Suddenly the silence was broken.
“Hooray for Clark!” cried a man at the edge of the copse.
“Hooray for Clark!”--it was the whole regiment this time. From
execration to exaltation was but a step, after all. And the Creoles fell
to scoffing at their sufferings and even forgot their hunger in staring
at the goal. The backwoodsmen took matters more stolidly, having
acquired long since the art of waiting. They lounged about, cleaning
their guns, watching the myriad flocks of wild ducks and geese casting
blue-black shadows on the ponds.
“Arrah, McChesney,” said Terence, as he watched the circling birds,
“Clark’s a great man, but ‘tis more riverince I’d have for him if wan av
thim was sizzling on the end of me ramrod.”
“I’d sooner hev the Ha’r Buyer’s sculp,” said Tom.
Presently there was a drama performed for our delectation. A shot came
down the wind, and we perceived that several innocent Creole gentlemen,
unconscious of what the timber held, were shooting the ducks and geese.
Whereupon Clark chose Antoine and three of our own Creoles to sally out
and shoot likewise--as decoys. We watched them working their way over
the ridges, and finally saw them coming back with one of the Vincennes
sportsmen. I cannot begin to depict the astonishment of this man when
he reached the copse, and was led before our lean, square-shouldered
commander. Yes, monsieur, he was a friend of les Américains. Did
Governor Hamilton know that a visit was imminent? Pardieu (with many
shrugs and outward gestures of the palms), Governor Hamilton had said if
the Long Knives had wings or fins they might reach him now--he was all
unprepared.
“Gentlemen,” said Colonel Clark to Captains Bowman and McCarty and
Williams, “we have come so far by audacity, and we must continue by
audacity. It is of no use to wait for the gunboat, and every moment
we run the risk of discovery. I shall write an open letter to the
inhabitants of Vincennes, which the prisoner shall take into town. I
shall tell them that those who are true to the oath they swore to Father
Gibault shall not be molested if they remain quietly in their houses.
Let those who are on the side of the Hair Buyer General and his King go
to the fort and fight there.”
He bade me fetch the portfolio he carried, and with numbed fingers wrote
the letter while his captains stared in admiration and amazement. What
a stroke was this! There were six hundred men in the town and
fort,--soldiers, inhabitants, and Indians,--while we had but 170,
starved and weakened by their incredible march. But Clark was not to
be daunted. Whipping out his field-glasses, he took a stand on a little
mound under the trees and followed the fast-galloping messenger across
the plain; saw him enter the town; saw the stir in the streets, knots of
men riding out and gazing, hands on foreheads, towards the place where
we were. But, as the minutes rolled into hours, there was no further
alarm. No gun, no beat to quarters or bugle-call from Fort Sackville.
What could it mean?
Clark’s next move was an enigma, for he set the men to cutting and
trimming tall sapling poles. To these were tied (how reverently!) the
twenty stands of colors which loving Creole hands had stitched. The
boisterous day was reddening to its close as the Colonel lined his
little army in front of the wood, and we covered the space of four
thousand. For the men were twenty feet apart and every tenth carried a
standard. Suddenly we were aghast as the full meaning of the inspiration
dawned upon us. The command was given, and we started on our march
toward Vincennes. But not straight,--zigzagging, always keeping the
ridges between us and the town, and to the watching inhabitants it
seemed as if thousands were coming to crush them. Night fell, the colors
were furled and the saplings dropped, and we pressed into serried
ranks and marched straight over hill and dale for the lights that were
beginning to twinkle ahead of us.
We halted once more, a quarter of a mile away. Clark himself had picked
fourteen men to go under Lieutenant Bayley through the town and take the
fort from the other side. Here was audacity with a vengeance. You may
be sure that Tom and Cowan and Ray were among these, and I trotted after
them with the drum banging against my thighs.
Was ever stronghold taken thus?
They went right into the town, the fourteen of them, into the main
street that led directly to the fort. The simple citizens gave back,
stupefied, at sight of the tall, striding forms. Muffled Indians stood
like statues as we passed, but these raised not a hand against us. Where
were Hamilton, Hamilton’s soldiers and savages? It was as if we had come
a-trading.
The street rose and fell in waves, like the prairie over which it ran.
As we climbed a ridge, here was a little log church, the rude cross
on the belfry showing dark against the sky. And there, in front of us,
flanked by blockhouses with conical caps, was the frowning mass of Fort
Sackville.
“Take cover,” said Williams, hoarsely. It seemed incredible.
The men spread hither and thither, some at the corners of the church,
some behind the fences of the little gardens. Tom chose a great forest
tree that had been left standing, and I went with him. He powdered his
pan, and I laid down my drum beside the tree, and then, with an impulse
that was rare, Tom seized me by the collar and drew me to him.
“Davy,” he whispered, and I pinched him. “Davy, I reckon Polly Ann’d be
kinder surprised if she knew where we was. Eh?”
I nodded. It seemed strange, indeed, to be talking thus at such a place.
Life has taught me since that it was not so strange, for however a
man may strive and suffer for an object, he usually sits quiet at the
consummation. Here we were in the door-yard of a peaceful cabin, the
ground frozen in lumps under our feet, and it seemed to me that the wind
had something to do with the lightness of the night.
“Davy,” whispered Tom again, “how’d ye like to see the little feller to
home?”
I pinched him again, and harder this time, for I was at a loss for
adequate words. The muscles of his legs were as hard as the strands of
a rope, and his buckskin breeches frozen so that they cracked under my
fingers.
Suddenly a flickering light arose ahead of us, and another, and we saw
that they were candles beginning to twinkle through the palings of the
fort. These were badly set, the width of a man’s hand apart. Presently
here comes a soldier with a torch, and as he walked we could see from
crack to crack his bluff face all reddened by the light, and so near
were we that we heard the words of his song:--
“O, there came a lass to Sudbury Fair,
With a hey, and a ho, nonny-nonny!
And she had a rose in her raven hair,
With a hey, and a ho, nonny-nonny!”
“By the etarnal!” said Tom, following the man along the palings with the
muzzle of his Deckard, “by the etarnal! ‘tis like shootin’ beef.”
A gust of laughter came from somewhere beyond. The burly soldier paused
at the foot of the blockhouse.
“Hi, Jem, have ye seen the General’s man? His Honor’s in a ‘igh temper,
I warrant ye.”
It was fortunate for Jem that he put his foot inside the blockhouse
door.
“Now, boys!”
It was Williams’s voice, and fourteen rifles sputtered out a ragged
volley.
There was an instant’s silence, and then a score of voices raised in
consternation,--shouting, cursing, commanding. Heavy feet pounded on the
platform of the blockhouse. While Tom was savagely jamming in powder and
ball, the wicket gate of the fort opened, a man came out and ran to a
house a biscuit’s throw away, and ran back again before he was shot at,
slamming the gate after him. Tom swore.
“We’ve got but the ten rounds,” he said, dropping his rifle to his knee.
“I reckon ‘tis no use to waste it.”
“The Willing may come to-night,” I answered.
There was a bugle winding a strange call, and the roll of a drum, and
the running continued.
“Don’t fire till you’re sure, boys,” said Captain Williams.
Our eyes caught sight of a form in the blockhouse port, there was an
instant when a candle flung its rays upon a cannon’s flank, and Tom’s
rifle spat a rod of flame. A red blot hid the cannon’s mouth, and behind
it a man staggered and fell on the candle, while the shot crunched its
way through the logs of the cottage in the yard where we stood. And now
the battle was on in earnest, fire darting here and there from the
black wall, bullets whistling and flying wide, and at intervals cannon
belching, their shot grinding through trees and houses. But our men
waited until the gunners lit their matches in the cannon-ports,--it was
no trick for a backwoodsman.
At length there came a popping right and left, and we knew that Bowman
and McCarty’s men had swung into position there.
An hour passed, and a shadow came along our line, darting from cover to
cover. It was Lieutenant Bayley, and he sent me back to find the Colonel
and to tell him that the men had but a few rounds left. I sped through
the streets on the errand, spied a Creole company waiting in reserve,
and near them, behind a warehouse, a knot of backwoodsmen, French,
and Indians, lighted up by a smoking torch. And here was Colonel Clark
talking to a big, blanketed chief. I was hovering around the skirts of
the crowd and seeking for an opening, when a hand pulled me off my feet.
“What ‘ll ye be afther now?” said a voice, which was Terence’s.
“Let me go,” I cried, “I have a message from Lieutenant Bayley.”
“Sure,” said Terence, “a man’d think ye had the Hair Buyer’s sculp
in yere pocket. The Colonel is treaty-makin’ with Tobaccy’s Son, the
grreatest Injun in these parrts.”
“I don’t care.”
“Hist!” said Terence.
“Let me go,” I yelled, so loudly that the Colonel turned, and Terence
dropped me like a live coal. I wormed my way to where Clark stood.
Tobacco’s Son was at that moment protesting that the Big Knives were
his brothers, and declaring that before morning broke he would have one
hundred warriors for the Great White Chief. Had he not made a treaty
of peace with Captain Helm, who was even then a prisoner of the British
general in the fort?
Colonel Clark replied that he knew well of the fidelity of Tobacco’s Son
to the Big Knives, that Tobacco’s Son had remained stanch in the face of
bribes and presents (this was true). Now all that Colonel Clark desired
of Tobacco’s Son besides his friendship was that he would keep his
warriors from battle. The Big Knives would fight their own fight. To
this sentiment Tobacco’s Son grunted extreme approval. Colonel Clark
turned to me.
“What is it, Davy?” he asked.
I told him.
“Tobacco’s Son has dug up for us King George’s ammunition,” he said. “Go
tell Lieutenant Bayley that I will send him enough to last him a month.”
I sped away with the message. Presently I came back again, upon another
message, and they were eating,--those reserves,--they were eating as I
had never seen men eat but once, at Kaskaskia. The baker stood by with
lifted palms, imploring the saints that he might have some compensation,
until Clark sent him back to his shop to knead and bake again. The good
Creoles approached the fires with the contents of their larders in their
hands. Terence tossed me a loaf the size of a cannon ball, and another.
“Fetch that wan to wan av the b’ys,” said he.
I seized as much as my arms could hold and scurried away to the firing
line once more, and, heedless of whistling bullets, darted from man to
man until the bread was exhausted. Not a one but gave me a “God bless
you, Davy,” ere he seized it with a great hand and began to eat in
wolfish bites, his Deckard always on the watch the while.
There was no sleep in the village. All night long, while the
rifles sputtered, the villagers in their capotes--men, women, and
children--huddled around the fires. The young men of the militia begged
Clark to allow them to fight, and to keep them well affected he sent
some here and there amongst our lines. For our Colonel’s strength
was not counted by rifles or men alone: he fought with his brain. As
Hamilton, the Hair Buyer, made his rounds, he believed the town to be in
possession of a horde of Kentuckians. Shouts, war-whoops, and bursts of
laughter went up from behind the town. Surely a great force was there,
a small part of which had been sent to play with him and his men. On the
fighting line, when there was a lull, our backwoodsmen stood up behind
their trees and cursed the enemy roundly, and often by these taunts
persuaded the furious gunners to open their ports and fire their cannon.
Woe be to him that showed an arm or a shoulder! Though a casement be
lifted ever so warily, a dozen balls would fly into it. And at length,
when some of the besieged had died in their anger, the ports were opened
no more. It was then our sharpshooters crept up boldly to within thirty
yards of them--nay, it seemed as if they lay under the very walls of the
fort. And through the night the figure of the Colonel himself was often
seen amongst them, praising their markmanship, pleading with every man
not to expose himself without cause. He spied me where I had wormed
myself behind the foot-board of a picket fence beneath the cannon-port
of a blockhouse. It was during one of the breathing spaces.
“What’s this?” said he to Cowan, sharply, feeling me with his foot.
“I reckon it’s Davy, sir,” said my friend, somewhat sheepishly. “We
can’t do nothin’ with him. He’s been up and down the line twenty times
this night.”
“What doing?” says the Colonel.
“Bread and powder and bullets,” answered Bill.
“But that’s all over,” says Clark.
“He’s the very devil to pry,” answered Bill. “The first we know he’ll be
into the fort under the logs.”
“Or between them,” says Clark, with a glance at the open palings. “Come
here, Davy.”
I followed him, dodging between the houses, and when we had got off the
line he took me by the two shoulders from behind.
“You little rascal,” said he, shaking me, “how am I to look out for an
army and you besides? Have you had anything to eat?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
We came to the fires, and Captain Bowman hurried up to meet him.
“We’re piling up earthworks and barricades,” said the Captain, “for the
fight to-morrow. My God! if the Willing would only come, we could put
our cannon into them.”
Clark laughed.
“Bowman,” said he, kindly, “has Davy fed you yet?”
“No,” says the Captain, surprised, “I’ve had no time to eat.”
“He seems to have fed the whole army,” said the Colonel. He paused.
“Have they scented Lamothe or Maisonville?”
“Devil a scent!” cried the Captain, “and we’ve scoured wood and
quagmire. They tell me that Lamothe has a very pretty force of redskins
at his heels.”
“Let McChesney go,” said Clark sharply, “McChesney and Ray. I’ll warrant
they can find ‘em.”
Now I knew that Maisonville had gone out a-chasing Captain Willing’s
brother,--he who had run into our arms. Lamothe was a noted Indian
partisan and a dangerous man to be dogging our rear that night. Suddenly
there came a thought that took my breath and set my heart a-hammering.
When the Colonel’s back was turned I slipped away beyond the range of
the firelight, and I was soon on the prairie, stumbling over hummocks
and floundering into ponds, yet going as quietly as I could, turning now
and again to look back at the distant glow or to listen to the rifles
popping around the fort. The night was cloudy and pitchy dark. Twice
the whirring of startled waterfowl frightened me out of my senses, but
ambition pricked me on in spite of fear. I may have gone a mile thus,
perchance two or three, straining every sense, when a sound brought
me to a stand. At first I could not distinguish it because of my heavy
breathing, but presently I made sure that it was the low drone of human
voices. Getting down on my hands and knees, I crept forward, and felt
the ground rising. The voices had ceased. I gained the crest of a low
ridge, and threw myself flat. A rattle of musketry set me shivering, and
in an agony of fright I looked behind me to discover that I could not be
more than four hundred yards from the fort. I had made a circle. I lay
very still, my eyes watered with staring, and then--the droning began
again. I went forward an inch, then another and another down the slope,
and at last I could have sworn that I saw dark blurs against the ground.
I put out my hand, my weight went after, and I had crashed through a
coating of ice up to my elbow in a pool. There came a second of sheer
terror, a hoarse challenge in French, and then I took to my heels and
flew towards the fort at the top of my speed.
I heard them coming after me, leap and bound, and crying out to one
another. Ahead of me there might have been a floor or a precipice, as
the ground looks level at night. I hurt my foot cruelly on a frozen clod
of earth, slid down the washed bank of a run into the Wabash, picked
myself up, scrambled to the top of the far side, and had gotten away
again when my pursuer shattered the ice behind me. A hundred yards more,
two figures loomed up in front, and I was pulled up choking.
“Hang to him, Fletcher!” said a voice.
“Great God!” cried Fletcher, “it’s Davy. What are ye up to now?”
“Let me go!” I cried, as soon as I had got my wind. As luck would have
it, I had run into a pair of daredevil young Kentuckians who had more
than once tasted the severity of Clark’s discipline,--Fletcher Blount
and Jim Willis. They fairly shook out of me what had happened, and then
dropped me with a war-whoop and started for the prairie, I after them,
crying out to them to beware of the run. A man must indeed be fleet
of foot to have escaped these young ruffians, and so it proved. When I
reached the hollow there were the two of them fighting with a man in the
water, the ice jangling as they shifted their feet.
“What’s yere name?” said Fletcher, cuffing and kicking his prisoner
until he cried out for mercy.
“Maisonville,” said the man, whereupon Fletcher gave a war-whoop and
kicked him again.
“That’s no way to use a prisoner,” said I, hotly.
“Hold your mouth, Davy,” said Fletcher, “you didn’t ketch him.”
“You wouldn’t have had him but for me,” I retorted.
Fletcher’s answer was an oath. They put Maisonville between them, ran
him through the town up to the firing line, and there, to my horror,
they tied him to a post and used him for a shield, despite his
heart-rending yells. In mortal fear that the poor man would be shot
down, I was running away to find some one who might have influence over
them when I met a lieutenant. He came up and ordered them angrily to
unbind Maisonville and bring him before the Colonel. Fletcher laughed,
whipped out his hunting knife, and cut the thongs; but he and Willis
had scarce got twenty paces from the officer before they seized poor
Maisonville by the hair and made shift to scalp him. This was merely
backwoods play, had Maisonville but known it. Persuaded, however, that
his last hour was come, he made a desperate effort to clear himself,
whereupon Fletcher cut off a piece of his skin by mistake. Maisonville,
making sure that he had been scalped, stood groaning and clapping his
hand to his head, while the two young rascals drew back and stared at
each other.
“What’s to do now?” said Willis.
“Take our medicine, I reckon,” answered Fletcher, grimly. And they
seized the tottering man between them, and marched him straightway to
the fire where Clark stood.
They had seen the Colonel angry before, but now they were fairly
withered under his wrath. And he could have given them no greater
punishment, for he took them from the firing line, and sent them back to
wait among the reserves until the morning.
“Nom de Dieu!” said Maisonville, wrathfully, as he watched them go,
“they should hang.”
“The stuff that brought them here through ice and flood is apt to boil
over, Captain,” remarked the Colonel, dryly.
“If you please, sir,” said I, “they did not mean to cut him, but he
wriggled.”
Clark turned sharply.
“Eh?” said he, “did you have a hand in this, too?”
“Peste!” cried the Captain, “the little ferret--you call him--he find
me on the prairie. I run to catch him with some men and fall into the
crick--” he pointed to his soaked leggings, “and your demons, they fall
on top of me.”
“I wish to heaven you had caught Lamothe instead, Davy,” said the
Colonel, and joined despite himself in the laugh that went up. Falling
sober again, he began to question the prisoner. Where was Lamothe?
Pardieu, Maisonville could not say. How many men did he have, etc.,
etc.? The circle about us deepened with eager listeners, who uttered
exclamations when Maisonville, between his answers, put up his hand to
his bleeding head. Suddenly the circle parted, and Captain Bowman came
through.
“Ray has discovered Lamothe, sir,” said he. “What shall we do?”
“Let him into the fort,” said Clark, instantly.
There was a murmur of astonished protest.
“Let him into the fort!” exclaimed Bowman.
“Certainly,” said the Colonel; “if he finds he cannot get in, he will be
off before the dawn to assemble the tribes.”
“But the fort is provisioned for a month,” Bowman expostulated; “and
they must find out to-morrow how weak we are.”
“To-morrow will be too late,” said Clark.
“And suppose he shouldn’t go in?”
“He will go in,” said the Colonel, quietly. “Withdraw your men, Captain,
from the north side.”
Captain Bowman departed. Whatever he may have thought of these orders,
he was too faithful a friend of the Colonel’s to delay their execution.
Murmuring, swearing oaths of astonishment, man after man on the firing
line dropped his rifle at the word, and sullenly retreated. The crack,
crack of the Deckards on the south and east were stilled; not a barrel
was thrust by the weary garrison through the logs, and the place became
silent as the wilderness. It was the long hour before the dawn. And as
we lay waiting on the hard ground, stiff and cold and hungry, talking in
whispers, somewhere near six of the clock on that February morning the
great square of Fort Sackville began to take shape. There was the long
line of the stockade, the projecting blockhouses at each corner with
peaked caps, and a higher capped square tower from the centre of the
enclosure, the banner of England drooping there and clinging forlorn to
its staff, as though with a presentiment. Then, as the light grew, the
close-lipped casements were seen, scarred with our bullets. The little
log houses of the town came out, the sapling palings and the bare
trees,--all grim and gaunt at that cruel season. Cattle lowed here and
there, and horses whinnied to be fed.
It was a dirty, gray dawn, and we waited until it had done its best.
From where we lay hid behind log house and palings we strained our eyes
towards the prairie to see if Lamothe would take the bait, until our
view was ended at the fuzzy top of a hillock. Bill Cowan, doubled up
behind a woodpile and breathing heavily, nudged me.
“Davy, Davy, what d’ye see!”.
Was it a head that broke the line of the crest? Even as I stared,
breathless, half a score of forms shot up and were running madly for the
stockade. Twenty more broke after them, Indians and Frenchmen, dodging,
swaying, crowding, looking fearfully to right and left. And from within
the fort came forth a hubbub,--cries and scuffling, orders, oaths, and
shouts. In plain view of our impatient Deckards soldiers manned the
platform, and we saw that they were flinging down ladders. An officer in
a faded scarlet coat stood out among the rest, shouting himself hoarse.
Involuntarily Cowan lined his sights across the woodpile on this mark of
color.
Lamothe’s men, a seething mass, were fighting like wolves for the
ladders, fearful yet that a volley might kill half of them where they
stood. And so fast did they scramble upwards that the men before them
stepped on their fingers. All at once and by acclamation the fierce
war-whoops of our men rent the air, and some toppled in sheer terror and
fell the twelve feet of the stockade at the sound of it. Then every man
in the regiment, Creole and backwoodsman, lay back to laugh. The answer
of the garrison was a defiant cheer, and those who had dropped, finding
they were not shot at, picked themselves up again and gained the top,
helping to pull the ladders after them. Bowman’s men swung back into
place, the rattle and drag were heard in the blockhouse as the cannon
were run out through the ports, and the battle which had held through
the night watches began again with redoubled vigor. But there was more
caution on the side of the British, for they had learned dearly how the
Kentuckians could measure crack and crevice.
There followed two hours and a futile waste of ammunition, the lead from
the garrison flying harmless here and there, and not a patch of skin or
cloth showing.