“Keep your head down, my boy,” my father kept saying to me. “Only look up when you are going to fire.”
This was good advice, but I did not see that he took it to himself, and I kept feeling a curious shrinking sensation as some better-aimed arrow than usual struck the box close to his head.
And so we went slowly on, my father dividing his time between loading, firing, and directing Pomp and Hannibal how to row, so as to keep the boats one behind the other, and diagonally across the stream, so that our sheltering defences might be presented square to the enemy, who followed us along the bank.
I’m afraid—and yet I do not know that I ought to speak like that of a set of savages who were thirsting for our blood—several of the Indians went down severely wounded, not from my firing, but from that of Morgan, for I saw them stagger and fall three times over after his shots. What happened after my father’s I could not see, for we were close together, and the smoke obscured everything.
For fully ten minutes this duel between lead and arrow went on, but no one on our side was hurt, though we had some very narrow escapes. I felt one arrow give quite a twitch at my hair as it passed close to my temple, and another went through my father’s hat. In the other boat too Morgan kept answering to our inquiries, and telling us that all was right, only that some of the arrows had come, as he termed it, “precious nigh, look you.”
“We shall not shake them off,” said my father, “till we reach the mouth and get into the big river, when I hope our firing will be heard and put them on their guard at the settlement. So don’t spare your shots when we get well out. They will be doing double duty—scaring the enemy and warning our friends. That’s right, Pompey, my lad, pull steadily.”
“Iss, massa, pull berry ’tead’ly,” said the boy, grinning.
“As soon as we get a little farther we will relieve you, my lad; and then, George,” he said, turning to me, “we must row hard for the settlement, unless,” he added, sadly, “the enemy are before us, and then— Hah!”
I started at the moment when my father uttered that ejaculation, for an arrow dropped between us, and stuck quivering in the thwart, standing nearly upright, as if it had fallen from the clouds.
“They have altered their tactics,” said my father. “Look there.”