The sight encouraged one party and discouraged the other proportionately.
With a roar and a volley, the Americans followed, and the German dragoons broke and fled.
Past the swaying, helpless herd of led horses they were driven, too much harassed to be allowed time to mount. Pell-mell after them followed the Green-Mountain Boys, and Bennington was won.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE PANIC.
Behind the ramparts of Fort Schuyler, near the present site of the town of Rome, an officer in the uniform of a Continental colonel, was standing in the twilight, looking out over the beleaguering camp of St. Leger, with his Tories and Indians, at the siege batteries. The increasing gloom alone made the situation tenable, for all day long the Indian riflemen had been lying down outside the fort, behind stumps and logs, picking off every one who ventured to show his head above the rampart.
The position of the fort had been growing more desperate daily, for its defenses were but slight at the best of times, and St. Leger’s artillery had been battering at them steadily ever since the siege first began, three weeks before. Provisions were growing scarce, and the Indian scouts, constantly creeping closer to the fort, rendered a sortie for forage impossible.
Colonel Gansevoort, the American leader, looked anxious and gloomy. Before his men and the enemy he kept up appearances nobly, but now that he was alone, the desolate nature of his position rushed on his mind with overpowering force, and compelled a feeling of almost despair.
Two weeks before, the column sent to his relief under General Herkimer, had been repulsed and almost annihilated, at the desperate battle of Oriskany, and since that time not a word had reached him from the outer world, save through the threatening dispatches of his foes.
All round the fort stretched the silent, primeval forest, for Fort Schuyler was then at the extreme bounds of civilization. Out of those woods came nothing but the whoop of the beleaguering savage, the spiteful crack of the rifle-shot, and the booming report of the brass howitzers.