e Royal
Greens and sent the flanking savages howling to cover.

Mount, Murphy, Elerson, and I lay behind a fallen hemlock, awaiting the
flank attack which we now understood must surely come. For our regiments
were at last completely surrounded, facing outward in an irregular
circle, the front held by the Palatines, the rear by the Caughnawagas,
the west by part of the Canajoharie regiment, and the east by a fraction
of unbrigaded militia, teamsters, batt-men, bateaux-men, and half a
dozen volunteer rangers reinforced by my three riflemen.

The scene was real enough to me now. Jack Mount, kneeling beside me, was
attempting to clean the blood from himself and Elerson with handfuls of
dried leaves. Murphy lay on his belly, watching the forest in front of
us, and his blue eyes seemed suffused with a light of their own in the
deepening gloom of the gathering thunder-storm. My nerves were all
a-quiver; the awful screaming from the ravine had never ceased for an
instant, and in that darkening, slimy pit I could still see a swaying
mass of men on the causeway, locked in a death-struggle. To and fro they
reeled; hatchet and knife and gun-stock glittered, rising and falling in
the twilight of the storm-cloud; the flames from the rifles
flashed crimson.

"Kape ye're eyes to the front, sorr; they do be comin'!" cried Murphy,
springing briskly to his feet.

I looked ahead into the darkening woods; the Caughnawaga men were
falling back, taking station behind trees; Mount stepped to the shelter
of a big oak; Elerson leaped to cover under a pine; a Caughnawaga
bateaux-man darted past me, stationing himself on my right behind the
trunk of a dapple beech. Suddenly an Indian showed himself close in
front; the Caughnawaga man fired and missed; and, quicker than I can
write it, the savage was on him before he could reload and had brained
him with a single castete-stroke. I fired, but the Mohawk was too quick
for me, and a moment later he bounded back into the brush while the
forest rang with his triumphant scalp-yell.

"That's what they're doing in front!" shouted Elerson. "When a soldier
fires they're on him before he can reload!"

"Two men to a tree!" roared Jack Mount. "Double up there, you
Caughnawaga men!"

Elerson glided cautiously to the oak which sheltered Mount; Murphy crept
forward to my tree.

"Bedad!" he muttered, "let the ondacent divils dhraw ye're fire an'
welcome. I've a pill to purge 'em now. Luk at that, sorr! Sh