"This is nothing but a feint," Croghan said to the younger officers.
While that corner replied with musketry, he kept a sharp lookout for the safety of the northwest blockhouse.
One soldier was brought down the ladder and carried through the murky pall to the surgeon, who could do nothing for him. Another turned from a loophole with blood upon him, laughing at his mishap. For the grotesqueness and inconvenience of a wound are sometimes more swiftly felt than its pain. He came back presently with his shoulder bandaged and resumed his place at the loophole.
The exhilaration of that powder atmosphere and its heat made soldiers throw off their coats, as if the expanding human body was not to be confined in wrappings.
In such twilight of war the twilight of Nature overtook us. Another feint was made to draw attention from a heavy force of assailants creeping within twenty paces, under cover of smoke, to surprise the northwest blockhouse.
Musketry was directed against them: they hesitated. The commander led a charge, and himself sprang first into the ditch. We saw the fine fellows leaping to carry the blockhouse, every man determined to be first in making a breach. They filled the ditch.
This was the instant for which Croghan had waited. He opened the porthole and unmasked his exactly trained cannon. It enfiladed the assailants, sweeping them at a distance of thirty feet; slugs and grapeshot hissed, spreading fan rays of death! By the flash of the re-loaded six-pounder, we saw the trench filled with dead and wounded.
The besiegers turned.
Croghan's sweating gunners swabbed and loaded and fired, roaring like lions.
The Indians, of whom there were nearly a thousand, were not in the charge, and when retreat began they went in panic. We could hear calls and yells, the clatter of arms, and a thumping of the earth; the strain of men tugging cannon ropes; the swift withdrawal of a routed force.