e dense snowy veil descending, the orange-tinted
rifle-flames flashed and sparkled and flickered; all around us a shower
of twigs and branches descended in a steady rain. Then our brown rifles
blazed their deadly answer. Splash! spatter! splash! their dead dropped
into the stream; and, following, dying and living took to the dark
water, thrashing across through snowy obscurity. I heard their horses
wallowing through the fords, iron hoofs frantically battering the
rocky, shelving banks for foothold; I heard them shriek when the Oneida
tigers leaped upon them; I heard their wounded battling and screaming
as they drowned in the swollen waters!

We lay and fired at their phantom lines, now attempting to retreat at a
dog-trot in single file; and as we knocked man after man from the
plodding rank the others leaped over their writhing, fallen comrades,
neither turning nor pausing in their dogged flight. The snow slackened,
falling more thinly to the west; and, as the dazzling curtain grew
transparent, a mass of men in green suddenly rose from the whitened
hemlock-scrub and fired at our riflemen arriving in column.

Then ensued a scene nigh indescribable. With one yelling bound, Ranger
and Oneida were on them, shooting, stabbing, dragging them down; and,
as they broke cover, their mounted officers, dashing out of the
thicket, wheeled northward into galloping flight; and among them at
last I saw my enemy, and knew him.

A dozen Oneidas were after him. His horse, spurred to a gallop, crashed
through the brush, and was in the water at a leap; and he turned in
midstream and shook his pistol at them insultingly.

By Heaven, he rode superbly as the swollen waters of the ford boiled to
his horse's straining shoulders, while the bullets clipped the gilded
cocked-hat from his head and struck his raised pistol from his hand.

"Head him!" shouted Elerson; "don't let that man get clear!" Indians
and Rangers raced madly along the bank of the creek, pacing the
fugitive as he galloped.

"Take him alive!" I cried, as Butler swung his horse with a crash
straight into the willow thickets on the north. We lost him to view as
I spoke; and I sounded the rally-whistle, and ran up the bank of the
creek, leading my horse at a trot behind me.

The snowfall had ceased; the sun glimmered, then blazed out in the
clearing, flooding the whitened ground with a dazzling radiance.
Running, stumbling, falling, struggling through brush and brake and
brie