tered into a fool's
peace with his foes, proceeded up to Detroit, and was back at Niagara
by winter; though he must have realized the worthlessness of the
campaign when his messengers sent to the Illinois were ambushed.

[Illustration: BOUQUET]

When Bouquet heard of the sham peace he was furious and repudiated
Bradstreet's treaty in toto. Bouquet was a veteran of the great war,
and knew bushfighting from seven years' experience on Pennsylvania
frontiers. Slowly, with his fifteen hundred rangers and five hundred
Highlanders, express riders keeping the trail open from fort to fort,
scouts to fore, Bouquet moved along the old army trail used by Forbes
to reach Fort Pitt. Friendly Indians had been warned to keep green
branches as signals in the muzzles of their guns. All others were to
be shot without mercy. Indians vanished before his march like mist
before the sun. August 5 found Bouquet south of Fort Pitt at a place
known as Bushy Run. The scouts had gone ahead to prepare nooning for
the army at the Run. In seven hours the men had marched seventeen
miles spite of sweltering heat; but at one, just as the thirsty columns
were nearing the rest place, the crack--crack--crack of rifle shots to
the fore set every man's blood jumping. From quick march they broke to
a run, priming guns, ball in mouth as they ran. A moment later the old
trick of Braddock's ambush was being repeated, but this time the
Indians were dealing with a seasoned man. Bouquet swung his fighters
in a circle round the stampeding horses and provision wagons. The heat
was terrific, the men almost mad with thirst, the horses neighing and
plunging and breaking away to the woods; and the army stood, a
red-coated, tartan-plaid target for invisible foes! By this time the
men were fighting as Indians fight--breaking ranks, jumping from tree
to tree. It is n't easy to keep men standing as targets when they
can't get at the foe; but Bouquet, riding from place to place, kept his
men in hand till darkness screened them. Sixty had fallen. A circular
barricade {289} was built of flour bags. Inside this the wounded were
laid, and the army camped without water. The agonies of that night
need not be told. Here the neighing of horses would bring down a
clatter of bullets aimed in the dark; and the groans of the wounded,
trampled by the stampeding cavalcade, would mingle with the screams of
terror from the horses. The night continued hot almost as day in