CHAPTER XVIII
THE HALTING OF THE FLEET
Adam Colfax had been making slow progress up the Ohio, far slower than he had hoped, and his brave soul was worn by hardships and troubled by apprehensions. A great hurricane had caused him serious alarm for his smaller boats. They had been saved from sinking with the greatest difficulty, and the precious stores had to be kept well and guarded well.
He was grieved and troubled, too, over the disappearance of the five, the valiant five who had continually been doing him such great service from the very moment of the start at New Orleans. He liked them all, and he mourned them for their own sakes as well. He also realized quickly that he had lost more than the five themselves. His fleet seemed to have come into a very nest of dangers. Men who went ashore to hunt never returned. At narrow points in the river they were fired upon from the dense forest on the bank, and if they sent a strong force ashore, they found nothing. If they camped at night, bullets drew blood or scattered the coals at their feet.
Invisible but none the less terrible foes hung upon them continually, and weakened their spirits. The men in the fleet were willing and eager to fight a foe whom they could see, but to be stung to death by invisible hornets was the worst of fates.
Adam Colfax missed the "eyes of the fleet" more and more every day. If Henry Ware and Shif'less Sol and their comrades had been there, they could have discovered these unseen foes, and they could have told him what to do. At night he often saw signal fires, blazing on either side of the Ohio and, although he did not know what they meant, he felt sure that they were lighted by his enemies, who were talking to one another.
Two or three of his men who had been originally woodsmen of the great valley told him that the allied tribes had come to destroy him. They had seen certain signs in the forest that could not be mistaken. The woods were full of warriors. They had heard, too, that further on was a fort on the river bank which the Indians had probably taken by this time, and which they would certainly use against the fleet. Adam Colfax wished once more for the five, who were more familiar than anybody else with the country, and who were such magnificent scouts. Never had he felt their absence more.
He came at last to the narrowest place in the river that he had yet seen, enclosed on either bank by jutting hills. As the fleet approached this watery pass a tremendous fire was opened upon it from either shore. The bullets not only came from the level of the water, but from the tops of the hills, and the sides of the boat offered no protection against the latter. The men of the fleet returned the fire, but their lead was sent into the forest and the undergrowth, and they did not know whether it hit anything except inoffensive wood and earth.
Adam Colfax drew back. He felt that he might have forced the pass, but the loss in men and stores would be too great. It was not his chief object to fight battles even if every battle should prove a victory.
When he withdrew, the forest relapsed into silence, but when he attempted the passage again the next day he was attacked by a similar, though greater, fire. He was now in a terrible quandary. He did not wish another such desperate battle as that which he had been forced to fight on the Lower Mississippi. He might win it, but there would be a great expenditure of men and ammunition, and at this vast distance from New Orleans neither could be replaced.