“You speak well,” Scarouady approved. “Chiefs promised to come and help, but they lied. I and my son will help. We have run all the way to find you; now we will run back and watch the French. Let Washington be getting ready with his soldiers and great guns.”
Away went the loyal Scarouady and the Buck. Washington trudged on, his gaunt face anxious, to where the men were falling down to rest and eat. Doctor Craik hurried about, giving medicine to those who were sick. Christopher Gist set out for Will’s Creek to hasten supplies and the soldier companies that were still there doing nothing, as far as anybody knew.
“Should you communicate with the Governor, tell him we have been without bread for eight days and have no salt with which to preserve our meat,” Washington said to Gist. “But if we are provisioned and the French prove no better than they did before, we can hold out.”
Washington did not rest. He walked about, with Captain Robert Strobo and Captain Vanbraam the Dutchman (who was stout no longer) and Major Muse, and Captain Mackaye, planning how to complete the fort.
Then the sun sank into the thunder clouds of the west, and night flowed in, and amid the darkness the tired guards walked their beats where, any moment, an Indian might spring with the hatchet.
Nothing happened this night. Early in the morning all the Long Knife Americans who could stand were set at work digging ditches and chopping trees and hauling logs, while the Mackaye soldiers kept guard. Washington himself, Vanbraam, Muse and other officers seized axes and helped; and young Captain Robert Strobo (a slender, lively, handsome man with round brown face and bright dark eyes) showed where the ditches and the walls should be put.
The old ditch with dirt thrown up was changed until it formed a triangle about thirty paces on a side, and the logs were laid on top of the dirt. On two of the sides another ditch was dug, a little way in front. The place was the best possible, on a piece of level ground two hundred and fifty paces wide, between hills, with a creek running through, for water—although there was to be water in plenty without it, they were to find out.
The nearest trees where an enemy could hide were on a point sixty paces distant, and these trees were being cut as fast as possible and used for logs.
This digging, chopping, hauling and piling was hard work for worn-out men. The Tanacharison people did not seem to think much of the fort, which Half-King called a “little thing,” not large enough to stay in—saying that Washington was foolish to expect the French to march down to it and be killed.
However, what better could be done, now? By sunset the outer ditch was only knee-deep, and the dirt of the entrenchment had been raised by only one or two logs. Then in the dusk Scarouady’s son came running. The French, in great number, were at Gist’s place, looking for Washington. They had fired upon Gist’s place before they had learned that nobody was there. Scarouady had stayed to watch them.