t came
persons from the battle bringing the appalling news that the Americans
had been defeated, and many of them slain, or made prisoners, and that
the enemy were in full possession of the forts. Then other parties
arrived whose woe-stricken faces only confirmed the sad intelligence.
Soon anxious inquiries sped from house to house where any lived who had
escaped from the slaughter, to learn about this one and that, who had
gone to the battle, but had not returned. Jennie could get no tidings of
her husband, though she spent the greater part of the day in watching
on the road, and several times even fancied that she saw him coming; but
alas! only to find it a delusion. It added to her fears for her husband,
when a neighbor named Monell, at whose house she called, met her with
the sorrowful news that his brother, Robert Monell, first lieutenant in
Capt. Van Keuren's company, had been killed in the battle. At length the
apprentices arrived, their faces begrimed with powder, and one of them
crying for his brother, who had been shot down by his side, and died
instantly.[17] The other, who was Joseph Elder, before spoken of, a
young man of giant frame, had narrowly escaped death, having his hat and
jacket pierced with bullets in the engagement! But having been separated
from Mr. Van Arsdale, they had not seen him since the battle, and so
were ignorant as to his fate. The wretched woman was in despair; many of
her neighbors had now returned and the prolonged absence of her Tunis
seemed to forbode that he had either been killed or captured by the
enemy. But now still others arrive, and she is led from their
statements, to hope that Tunis has escaped, and is making his way
homeward through the mountains. Her heart leaps with joy, and she
returns to the house, and even indulges a laugh as her eye gets a sight
of the mush kettle still hanging on the trammel, as she placed it there
in the morning; no meal stirred in, and she having eaten nothing the
whole day. Towards night Tunis arrived, on horseback, with his
brother-in-law William Wear, who at Jennie's request, had gone out some
distance to look for him.[18] He was fast asleep from exhaustion when
they reached the house, (Wear behind him and holding him on the horse),
and his face so blackened with powder that his wife hardly knew him. He
was much depressed in spirits, but grateful to God who had preserved and
restored him to his family and friends. That evening brought in his
c