This was the night of the 24th November, and to Roland, like many others, it was a sleepless one, as he commanded an out-picket and had to visit his sentinels every hour.
On one side of his post rolled the mighty river, reflecting in its ripples the star-spangled sky; on the other, stretched away into darkness and utter obscurity the vast dingles of an American forest, planted and grown by nature.
His mind was full of that last evening with Aurelia and all its sweet details. On his odious rival he scarcely bestowed a thought, and he felt happier than an emperor in his palace, as he lay there, with his cloak around him, his sword and pistols at hand, his head pillowed on a pine-log, and all oblivious of the rattlesnakes, which there are six feet long. Near him was Robert Bruce, one of his sentinels, treading softly to and fro, with bayonet fixed, and singing to himself the old Scottish barrackroom ditty:—
"Poor Willie was landed at bonnie Dumbarton,
Where the stream from Loch Lomond runs into the sea,
While at home in sweet Ireland, he left Mary Martin,
With a babe at her breast and a child at her knee."
The night passed in quietude, apart from the alarming sounds mentioned; on the 25th November the march was resumed, and on coming within a mile of St. Charles, puffs of white smoke spirted out of the dark jungly brushwood on the opposite side of the river, as the rebels daringly opened a straggling fire upon Her Majesty's troops. A Royal Scot was struck down by Roland's side, and several were wounded.
Rifle shots were also fired from a barn in front.
"Push on, Logan!" exclaimed Colonel Wetherall; "push on and storm that place at the point of the bayonet!"
Logan advanced with his company at a rush; his powerful arm burst in the door; the place was taken, all in it bayoneted or put to flight, and then it was set in flames, the whole affair occupying little more than the time we take to narrate the episode.
Near St. Charles were more than fifteen hundred insurrectionists under Papineau and Colonel Smash, posted in a strong and closely stockaded work from which they opened a sharp and serious fire, the echoes of which the adjacent forest repeated with a thousand reverberations, while the whole place seemed enveloped in white smoke, streaked with flashes of red fire.
The Royals responded with several rounds well thrown in; but they had stormed too many such, works in Burmah, the land of stockades, to linger in attacking this one.