That day rapids and forests appeared to rock with the vibration of savage yells, for soon after daylight the expected force arrived.
La Mouche had sulked some time at the loop-hole where he was stationed with Annahotaha. Massawippa’s back was towards him during all this period of distress. She never saw that he was thirsty and that his cracked lips bled. If she was solicitous for anybody except the stalwart chief, it was for that white wife of Dollard, who stood always near Dollard when not doing what could be done for the wounded.
La Mouche had no stomach for dying an unrewarded death. Dogged hatred of his false position and of his tardy suit had grown large within him. He therefore left his loop-hole while Annahotaha’s gun was emptied, leaped on top of the palisade, and stretched his dark face back an instant to interrogate Massawippa’s quick eye. A motion of her head might yet bring him back. But did she think that he meant to be killed like a dog to whom the bone of a good word has never been thrown?
“My father!” shouted the girl, pointing with a finger which pierced La Mouche’s soul. “Shoot that coward; shoot him down!”
Annahotaha seized the long pistol from his side and discharged it at his deserting nephew. But La Mouche in the same instant dropped outside and ran over to the Iroquois.
There remained now only the Frenchmen, Annahotaha, and the four Algonquins.
Playfully, as a cat reaches out to cuff its mouse, the army of Iroquois now approached the fort. They gamboled from side to side and uttered screeches. But the loop-holes were yet all manned by men who would not die of fatigue and physical privation, and the fire which sprung from those loop-holes astounded the enemy. Guns of large caliber carried scraps of iron and lead, and mowed like artillery.
Three days more, says the chronicle, did this fort by the Long Saut hold out. Who can tell all the story of those days? and who can hear all the story of such endurance? When acclamation cheers a man’s blood and a great cloud of witnesses encompasses him, heroic courage is made easy. But here were a few doomed men in the wilderness, whose fate and whose action might be misrepresented by a surviving foe—silent fighters against odds, thinking, “This anguish and sacrifice of mine are lost on the void, and perhaps taken no account of by any intelligence, except that myself knows it, and myself demands it of me.”
This is the courage which brings a man’s soul up above his body like a tall flame out of an altar, and makes us credit the tale of our lineage tracing thus backward: “Which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God.”
