place in preparation for a
winter attack which Loudon had planned, but which, like the rest of his
schemes, fell to the ground.[541] Towards midwinter a band of these
intruders captured two soldiers and butchered some fifteen cattle close
to the fort, leaving tied to the horns of one of them a note addressed
to the commandant in these terms: "I am obliged to you, sir, for the
rest you have allowed me to take and the fresh meat you have sent me. I
shall take good care of my prisoners. My compliments to the Marquis of
Montcalm." Signed, Rogers.[542]

[Footnote 540: _Montcalm a Bourlamaque, 28 Mars, 1758_.]

[Footnote 541: _Loudon to Pitt, 14 Feb. 1758_.]

[Footnote 542: _Journal de ce qui s'est passe en Canada, 1757, 1758_.
Compare Rogers, _Journals_, 72-75.]

A few weeks later Hebecourt had his revenge. About the middle of March a
report came to Montreal that a large party of rangers had been cut to
pieces a few miles from Ticonderoga, and that Rogers himself was among
the slain. This last announcement proved false; but the rangers had
suffered a crushing defeat. Colonel Haviland, commanding at Fort Edward,
sent a hundred and eighty of them, men and officers, on a scouting party
towards Ticonderoga; and Captain Pringle and Lieutenant Roche, of the
twenty-seventh regiment, joined them as volunteers, no doubt through a
love of hardy adventure, which was destined to be fully satisfied.
Rogers commanded the whole. They passed down Lake George on the ice
under cover of night, and then, as they neared the French outposts,
pursued their way by land behind Rogers Rock and the other mountains of
the western shore. On the preceding day, the twelfth of March, Hebecourt
had received a reinforcement of two hundred Mission Indians and a body
of Canadians. The Indians had no sooner arrived than, though nominally
Christians, they consulted the spirits, by whom they were told that the
English were coming. On this they sent out scouts, who came back
breathless, declaring that they had found a great number of snow-shoe
tracks. The superhuman warning being thus confirmed, the whole body of
Indians, joined by a band of Canadians and a number of volunteers from
the regulars, set out to meet the approaching enemy, and took their way
up the valley of Trout Brook, a mountain gorge that opens from the west
upon the valley of Ticonderoga.

Towards three o'clock on the afternoon of that day Rogers had reached a
point nearly west of the mountai