“Listen!” exclaimed Scarouady. “You are men. We are brothers. Do the Black Rifles and the Mingo scout together against the French and Ottawa dogs? Good! Now I feel hope.”
“No,” said the Black Rifle. “The English chief sends us away. He has soldiers in red to fight in the woods for him.” The Black Rifle men hurried on.
Gist laughed angrily.
“Scarouady knows that the Black Rifle is worth five hundred red-coat soldiers who have never fought in the woods. The Black Rifle offered to serve without pay.”
“I see that the chief called Braddock is like a buffalo bull,” replied Scarouady. “Where he looks, there he will go, without reason. He sends away my fifty warriors; he sends away the Black Rifle. If he sends away Washington and the Long Knives, we are lost, for in the woods his red-coat soldiers will be like the gobbling turkey when the hunter watches.”
After the long time getting prepared they all started to capture Fort Duquesne. This day was the tenth day of June, in the year Seventeen Hundred and Fifty-five. There were two thousand one hundred men. Six hundred men with axes and provision wagons and cannon had been ordered ahead to widen Washington’s road from Will’s Creek to Gist’s place. The army followed, with Gist and Scarouady’s men scouting in advance.
The march was very slow, because of the baggage and the great guns. The officers rode horses, and there was a small company of Long Knives called “Light Horse;” the other soldiers walked. Sometimes only two or three miles were covered in a day, and the line of men and wagons and cannon and pack horses reached from camp to camp.
Looking back through clearings, the Buck and Robert could see the march: a long, long column of wagons, cannon and horses, and on either side the red coats, and the fewer blue coats, all toiling up hill and down hill, through woods and bogs, with their weapons flashing and the thickly clothed English soldiers sweating as they carried their heavy muskets, knapsacks, cartridge boxes, tall hats and their stiff boots.
If their own scouts could see them so plainly, the enemy could see them, too. This proved to be true. The Buck came running back one evening and said that he and Scarouady had been seized by French and Indians, but that he had escaped to bring the news.