“If you mean to fight off the French,” said Tanacharison, “you should at once build a high fence, with a ditch, and stay behind it, where you can move about. Else you will be shut up in these little houses and the French will knock them to pieces over your heads with their great guns. Where is Fraser? He has more experience than you.”
“I will get him,” answered Ward. So he went up to John Fraser’s trading place, eight or ten miles south; and Lieutenant Fraser said he could not leave his business—he knew that the French were near, and he did not see that anything could be done.
“Then I will build a stockade and wait; for I think it a shame to draw off before the French, as the rest of you have done,” Ward answered angrily. “The Indians will think us cowards.”
The men worked very hard, building a stockade of sharpened pickets, with a ditch inside it, in a good place. This last morning which was the morning of April 17th, White Thunder’s pretty daughter Bright Lightning borrowed Robert’s horse to ride up to Shanopin’s-town. Nobody could refuse Bright Lightning anything.
“Maybe I will see the French,” she said. “These English see nothing. They have no scouts out. I wish I were a warrior.”
“Well, you can marry a Delaware and perhaps some day you will be a woman sachem like old Allaquippa, and smoke a pipe,” Robert teased.
“Wah!” exclaimed Bright Lightning. “She is ugly and fat. When I tell you the French are coming, then I’ll know whether you and your Long Knife Americans are warriors, yourselves.”
[Bright Lightning rode off astride.] She had been gone only two hours when back she galloped——
