ar, and all the force of the
enemy rushed upon it, shouting and screeching. There was a moment of
total confusion; but a part of Williams's regiment rallied under command
of Whiting, and covered the retreat, fighting behind trees like Indians,
and firing and falling back by turns, bravely aided by some of the
Mohawks and by a detachment which Johnson sent to their aid. "And a very
handsome retreat they made," writes Pomeroy; "and so continued till they
came within about three quarters of a mile of our camp. This was the
last fire our men gave our enemies, which killed great numbers of them;
they were seen to drop as pigeons." So ended the fray long known in New
England fireside story as the "bloody morning scout." Dieskau now
ordered a halt, and sounded his trumpets to collect his scattered men.
His Indians, however, were sullen and unmanageable, and the Canadians
also showed signs of wavering. The veteran who commanded them all,
Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, had been killed. At length they were
persuaded to move again, the regulars leading the way.

About an hour after Williams and his men had begun their march, a
distant rattle of musketry was heard at the camp; and as it grew nearer
and louder, the listeners knew that their comrades were on the retreat.
Then, at the eleventh hour, preparations were begun for defence. A sort
of barricade was made along the front of the camp, partly of wagons, and
partly of inverted bateaux, but chiefly of the trunks of trees hastily
hewn down in the neighboring forest and laid end to end in a single row.
The line extended from the southern slopes of the hill on the left
across a tract of rough ground to the marshes on the right. The forest,
choked with bushes and clumps of rank ferns, was within a few yards of
the barricade, and there was scarcely time to hack away the intervening
thickets. Three cannon were planted to sweep the road that descended
through the pines, and another was dragged up to the ridge of the hill.
The defeated party began to come in; first, scared fugitives both white
and red, then, gangs of men bringing the wounded; and at last, an hour
and a half after the first fire was heard, the main detachment was seen
marching in compact bodies down the road.

Five hundred men were detailed to guard the flanks of the camp. The rest
stood behind the wagons or lay flat behind the logs and inverted
bateaux, the Massachusetts men on the right, and the Connecticut men on
the left