SIX FIGURES IN THE DUSK
The hours moved slowly, and Henry began to believe that his grandiloquent speech—purposely so—had met with some success. No attack was made, and delay was what he wanted. The woods seemed to remain the home of peace and quiet. Major Braithwaite had a pair of strong military glasses, and, as an additional precaution, he and Henry searched the woods with them from the upper windows of the blockhouse. Still there was no evidence of Indian attack, and Henry turned the glasses upon the river. He could now make out definitely the canoes, half hidden under the foliage on the far bank, but no stir was there. All things seemed to be waiting.
Henry turned the glasses down the river. He had a long view, but he saw only the Ohio and its yellow ripples. He lowered the glasses with an impatient little movement and handed them back to their owner.
"Why are you disappointed?" asked Major Braithwaite.
"I was hoping that the fleet might be coming, which would be a vast help to you here, but I see no sign of its approach. Of course it's slow work for rowers and oarsmen to come week after week against a strong current, and they have been delayed, too, by storms."
The news, confined hitherto to a few, spread through the fort, that a fleet might come soon to their help, and there was a wonderful revival of spirits. People were continually climbing to the cupola of the blockhouse, and the Major's glasses were in unbroken use. Always they were pointed down the stream, and women's eyes as well as men's looked anxiously for a boat, a boat bearing white men, the vanguard of the force that would come to save them. The sight of these women so eagerly studying the Ohio moved Henry. He knew, perhaps better than they, that they had the most to fear, and he resolved never to desert them.
In this interval of quiet Henry went down to the little spring which was just east of the last row of houses, but a full twenty yards from the palisade. The ground sank away abruptly there, leaving a little bluff of stone three or four feet high. The stream, two inches deep and six inches broad, beautifully clear and almost as cold as ice, flowed from an opening at the base of the bluff. A round pool, five or six feet across and two feet deep, had been cut in the stone at the outlet of the spring, and a gourd lay beside it for the use of all who wished to drink.
Henry drank from the pool and sat down beside it with his back against a rock. He watched the water, as it overflowed the pool, trickle away toward the river, and then, closing his eyes, he thought of his comrades, the faithful four. Where were they now? He felt a powerful temptation, now that he had warned Fort Prescott, to slip away in the darkness of the night that was to come and seek them. Three of them were wounded and Paul, who alone was unhurt, did not have the skill of the others in the forest. But powerful as the temptation was, it was a temptation only and he put it away. They must wait, as he himself would have been glad to wait, had it been Shif'less Sol or any other who had arrived instead of himself.
He kept his eyes shut a long while. It seemed to him at this time that he could think more strongly and clearly with all external objects shut out. He saw now without any flattery to self that his presence in the fort was invaluable. Major Braithwaite did not understand forest strategy, but nature and circumstance combined had compelled the boy to learn them. He knew, too, of the fleet of Adam Colfax and its elements, and the plans of the allied tribes and their elements. He seemed to hold the very threads of fate in his hands, whether for good or ill.
Henry Ware opened his eyes, and chance directed that he should open them when his gaze would rest up the stream. There was a black beam in the very center of the circle of vision, and he stared at it. It was moving, and he rose to his feet. He knew that the object was a boat, but it was much larger than an Indian canoe, much larger even than the great war canoes that they sometimes built, capable of carrying thirty or forty men. It was not long, slim, and graceful, but broad of beam, and came slowly and heavily like one of the large square flatboats in which the pioneers sometimes came down the Ohio.