slain....

"... It's enough to make me swear!--
That Sally had a baby,
And the baby had red hair...."

... Then piercing and wildly plaintive, the clarions rang out, clamoring
for victory and _vae victis_ ... and Din Driscoll's hoarse voice....
"We are the last of the race, let us be the best as well."... "Back at
'em, fellows!" Bledsoe bellows.... And the parson murmurs, "He prays
best who fights best, both great and small" ... his soft voice tremulous
enough for Glory, his superb trigger finger disturbing enough for
Chaos.... At last, the supreme command "like volley'd lightning"--"Give
'em the revolver. _Charge!_"...

Not until the story is told shall ... for over the battered masonry, in
through the splintered doors, felling shadowy foes on every hand....
When well within-side ... the prowess of each unto himself ... tempest
of pistol cracking ... bleeding deathfully ... ah, the killing is fast
and desperate ... and not a candle over the pitiless fray.... Huddled
together for a brief last stand, the Cossacks ... panic, flight....
_The fort is taken!_

When the incarnadine embers of sunrise glowed in the east, the
Missourians stood on the battlements and surveyed their domain. "You are
the man to win, Joe Bowers," Mose hummed with an I-told-you-so air, but
softly, for many of his comrades were wounded, though he was not, as
usual, for all his seven feet of perpendicular target. But "the Doc," of
Benton, was, of course. Getting wounded was the greatest trouble with
Doc. If he attacked a hornet's nest, he would contrive some way to get a
leg shot off. But with him such things had become to be a matter of
course, so now he crated himself together enough to move around and
attend to the others. Driscoll was most innumerably barked, with a
perforated humerus as climax. [The modest Boone might have catalogued
similarly his own casualties.] Old Brothers and Sisters, that cool
Christian, had lost a lens out of his spectacles, and was now replacing
it from a supply he always carried. What, though, were fractured arms
and busted specs to becoming a republic over night?

But eternal vigilance is ever ... and menace was not long in coming.
Three French gunboats, like sluggish water beetles, crossed the bar and
steamed up the river.... Promptly the howitzers on the ramparts were
trained.... But there was no need ... a white flag ... a naval
lieutenant at the fortress gate.... The gunboats had not come to fight.
Baza