lies master and men with such lavish
hospitality that Washington has much trouble to keep his drunk Indians
from deserting, and dismisses his visitor with the smooth but bootless
response that as France and England are at peace he cannot answer
Governor Dinwiddie's message till he has heard from the Governor of
Canada, Marquis Duquesne. Not much satisfaction for emissaries who had
forded ice-rafted rivers and had tramped the drifted forests for three
hundred miles.

[Illustration: GOVERNOR DINWIDDIE OF VIRGINIA]

By January of 1754 Washington is back in Virginia. By May he is on the
trail again, blazing a path through the wilderness down the Monongahela
towards the French fort; for what purpose one may guess, though these
were times of piping peace. Come {225} an old Indian chief and an
English bushwhacker one morning with word that fifty French raiders are
on the trail ten miles away; for what purpose one may guess, spite of
peace. Instantly Washington sends half a hundred Virginia frontiersmen
out scouting. They find no trace of raiders, but the old chief picks
up the trail of the ambushed French. Here they had broken branches
going through the woods; there a moccasin track punctures the spongy
mold; here leaves have been scattered to hide camp ashes. At midnight,
with the rain slashing through the forest black as pitch, Washington
sets out with forty men, following his Indian guide. Through the dark
they feel rather than follow the trail, and it is a slow but an easy
trick to those acquainted with wildwood travel. Leave the path by as
much as a foot length and the foliage lashes you back, or the windfall
trips you up, or the punky path becomes punctured beneath moccasin
tread. By day dawn, misty and gray in the May woods, the English are
at the Indian camp and march forward escorted by the redskins, single
file, silent as ghosts, alert as tigers. Raindrip swashes on the
buckskin coats. Muskets are loaded and carefully cased from the wet.
The old chief stops suddenly . . . and points! There lie the French in
a rock ravine sheltered by the woods like a cave. The next instant the
French had leaped up with a whoop. Washington shouted "Fire!" When
the smoke of the musket crash cleared, ten French lay dead, among them
their officer, Jumonville; {226} and twenty-two others surrendered. No
need to dispute whether Washington was justified in firing on thirty
bush rovers in time of peace! The bushrovers had