Ned in the Block-House: A Tale of Early Days in the West

by Edward Sylvester Ellis

Instantly there followed such a prodigious shock, from a blow against the door, that the whole building shook. Before the men could bring their guns to bear, the sound of rapidly running feet showed that the Indians had dropped their battering ram and hurried off in the darkness.

Almost at the same moment Mrs. Preston, who was peering through the loopholes on the eastern side, saw an Indian arrow, wrapped with blazing tow, shoot upward from the edge of the woods, and going slower and slower, as it curved over, sweep downward with a whizzing rush, and strike the roof overhead, with the same abrupt thud that had been heard several times.

It was followed immediately by a second from the same point, which seemed to take the same course, for it lodged very close beside it, and also held its place.

Then another flaming missile rose from the northern side, then from the south, and then from behind the river bank, with still others mounting from intervening points, until a beautiful and terrifying scene presented itself.

The blazing shafts followed each other in such rapid succession, that there were fully twenty ascending and descending at the same moment. These made all manner of fiery parabolas in the snowy atmosphere. One archer, who sent his missiles from the upper window of the cabin near the block-house, and another, who discharged his from behind the pickets close at hand, pointed them so nearly perpendicularly that they seemed to shoot downward almost directly through the fiery trail they made in their ascent. Others came from such distant points that their parabolas were lengthy, and they only rose a short distance above the block-house itself, before they plunged into the slabs of the roof.

These struck the latter at every possible angle, and with every imaginable result. In some cases the arrow was so warped in its flight that it took a path almost as erratic as that of the Australian boomerang. Impinging against the roof at an acute angle, it would glance far upward, and, turning over and over, come tumbling to the earth, where it flickered a minute and died out.

Others hit the planks, and, like a mountaineer among the rocks, who could not retain his hold, slid down the steep incline to the ground. Still others missed the building altogether, and, plunging their flinty heads in the earth, were quickly extinguished.

But the alarming fact remained that the majority of the flaming missiles found a lodgment in the roof, where they burned with a fierceness which showed they were an improvement on those first sent. One could not but wonder where the Wyandots obtained all these weapons: they must have started on the expedition with the expectation of using this peculiar mode of warfare.

The fiery shower lasted but a few minutes, but at the end of that time there were fully thirty shafts sticking in the roof and burning vigorously. Viewed from the outside the block-house looked like some vast monster whose hide was pierced with flaming spears, but who slumbered on in the darkness, unmindful of the pests.

This lavish distribution of fire showed that the ground was covered with a fine sprinkling of snow, which was still floating downward at an almost imperceptible rate. There was no such mantle on the roof. It was so smooth and steep that most of the particles ran downward and off. A thin tiny line of snow-points was continually pouring over the eaves, where the wind blew it to atoms again.