he
advance. Even officers shouted, "Forward! forward! Wake up Honikol!" And
spoke of the old General derisively, even injuriously, to their own
lasting disgrace.

Towards dawn, when I lay down on the floor of a barn to sleep, the
uproar had died out in a measure; but lights still flickered in the camp
where soldiers were smoking their pipes and playing cards by the flare
of splinter-wood torches. As for the pickets, they paid not the
slightest attention to their duties, continually leaving their posts to
hobnob with neighbors; and the indiscipline alarmed me, for what could
one expect to find in men who roamed about where it pleased them,
howling their dissatisfaction with their commander, and addressing their
officers by their first names?

At eight o'clock on that oppressive August morning, while writing a
letter to my cousin Dorothy, which an Oneida had promised to deliver, he
being about to start with a message to Governor Clinton, I was
interrupted by Jack Mount, who came into the barn, saying that a company
of officers were quarrelling in front of the sugar-shack occupied as
headquarters.

I folded my letter, sealed it with a bit of blue balsam gum, and bade
Mount deliver it to the Oneida runner, while I stepped up the road.

Of all unseemly sights that I have ever had the misfortune to witness,
what I now saw was the most shameful. I pushed and shouldered my way
through a riotous mob of soldiers and teamsters which choked the
highway; loud, angry voices raised in reproach or dispute assailed my
ears. A group of militia officers were shouting, shoving, and
gesticulating in front of the tent where, rigid in his arm-chair, the
General sat, grim, narrow-eyed, silent, smoking a short clay pipe. Bolt
upright, behind him, stood his chief scout and interpreter, a superb
Oneida, in all the splendor of full war-paint, blazing with scarlet.

Colonel Cox, a swaggering, intrusive, loud-voiced, and smartly uniformed
officer, made a sign for silence and began haranguing the old man,
evidently as spokesman for the party of impudent malcontents grouped
about him. I heard him demand that his men be led against the British
without further delay. I heard him condemn delay as unreasonable and
unwarrantable, and the terms of speech he used were unbecoming to
an officer.

"We call on you, sir, in the name of Tryon County, to order us forward!"
he said, loudly. "We are ready. For God's sake give the order, sir!
There is no time