A WARNING FROM THE FOREST
It was at Winchester that Colonel Washington established his headquarters, maintaining a detachment at Fort Cumberland sufficient to repel any attack the Indians were like to make against it, and to cut off such of their war parties as ventured east of it. From Winchester he was able more easily to keep in touch with all parts of the frontier, and with the string of blockhouses which had been built years before as a gathering-place for the settlers in the event of Indian incursions. By the first of September his arrangements had been completed, but long before that time it was evident the task was to be no easy one.
Already, from the high passes of the Alleghenies, war parties of Delawares and Shawanoes had descended, sweeping down upon the frontier families like a devastating whirlwind, and butchering men, women, and children with impartial fury. The unbounded forest, which covered hill and valley with a curtain of unbroken foliage, afforded a thousand lurking-places, and it was well-nigh impossible for an armed force to get within striking distance of the marauders. So, almost daily, stories of horrible cruelty came to the fort, plunging the commander into an agony of rage and dejection at his very impotence. The fort was soon crowded with refugees,—wives bewailing their husbands, husbands swearing to avenge their wives, parents lamenting their children, children of a sudden made orphans,—and from north and south, scores of hard-featured, steel-eyed men came to us, their rifles in their hands, to offer their services, and after a time these came to be one of the most valuable portions of our force.
Ah, the stories they told us! Tragedies such as that which Spiltdorph and I had come upon had been repeated scores of times. The settler who had left his cabin at daybreak in search of game, or to carry his furs to the nearest post, returned at sundown to find only a smoking heap of ashes where his home had been, and among them the charred and mutilated bodies of his wife and children. Horror succeeded horror, and the climax came one day when we were passing a little schoolhouse some miles below the fort, in the midst of a district well populated. Wondering at the unwonted silence, we dismounted, opened the door, and looked within. The master lay upon the platform with his pupils around him, all dead and newly scalped. The savages had passed that way not half an hour before.
And to add to the trials of the commander, his troops, hastily got together, were most of them impatient of restraint or discipline, and with no knowledge of warfare, while the governor and the House of Burgesses demanded that he undertake impossibilities. It was a dreary, trying, thankless task.
"They expect me to perform miracles," he said to me bitterly one day. "How am I to protect a frontier four hundred miles in length with five or six hundred effective men, against an enemy who knows every foot of the ground, and who can find a hiding-place at every step?"
Only by the sternest measures could many of the levies be brought to the fort, and one man—a captain, God save the mark!—sent word that he and his company could not come because their corn had not yet been got in. Yet, in spite of all these drawbacks, we did accomplish something. There were a few of the Iroquois who yet remained our friends, and the general spared no effort to retain their goodwill, for their services were invaluable. With a lofty contempt for the Delawares and Shawanoes, whom they had one time subjugated and compelled to assume the name of women, they roamed the forest for miles around, and more than once enabled us to ambush one of the war parties and send it howling back to the Muskingum, where there was great weeping and wailing in the lodges upon its return. But it was fruitless work, for the Indians, driven back for the moment, returned with augmented fury, and again drenched the frontier in the blood of the colonists.
We realized one and all that nothing we could do would turn the tide of war permanently from our borders and render the frontier safe until the French had been driven from Fort Duquesne. For it was they who urged the Indians on, supplying them with guns and ammunition, and rewarding them with rum when they returned to the fort laden with English scalps. An expedition against the French stronghold was for the present out of the question, and we could only bite our nails and curse, waiting for another night when we might sally forth and fall upon one of the war parties. But the few Indians we killed seemed a pitiful atonement for the mangled bodies scattered along the frontier and the hundreds of homes of which there remained nothing but blackened ruins. As the weeks passed and the Indians saw our impotence, they grew bolder, slipped through the chain of blockhouses, and ravaged the country east of us, disappearing into the woods as if by magic at the first alarm.
The month of August and the first portion of September wore away in this dreary manner, and it was perhaps a week later that Colonel Washington sent me to Frederick to make arrangements for some supplies. The distance, which was a scant fifty miles, was over a well-traveled road, and through a district so well protected that the Indians had not dared to visit it; so I rode out of the fort one morning, taking with me only my negro boy Sam, whom I had selected for my servant since the day he had warned me against Polete. I remember that the day was very warm, and that there was no air stirring, so that we pushed forward with indifferent speed. At noon we reached a farmhouse owned by John Evans, where we remained until the heat had somewhat moderated, and set forward again about four o'clock in the afternoon.
We had ridden for near an hour, and I was deep in my own thoughts, when I heard something breaking its way through the underbrush, and the next moment my horse shied violently as a negro stumbled blindly into the road and collapsed into a heap before he had taken half a dozen steps along it. I reined up sharply, and as I did so, heard Sam give a shrill cry of alarm.