“True, sir,” responded Lance.
“Shall we leave Mr. Washington here while we reconnoitre the front of the house?” asked Lord Fairfax of Lance, who was the actual commandant of the garrison.
“I think so, sir—with Cæsar and one or two others. But keep your eye on Black Bear, Mr. Washington,” said Lance, “as well as this passage.” Just then the noise of an assault on the other part of the house was heard, and the whole force went over on that side, leaving George, and Cæsar the cook, and Jake the scullion, to watch the passageway.
Occasionally they could see, by the dim light of a lantern hung to the wall, a figure passing to and fro in the kitchen, and the shattered timbers of the door, through which a white light was visible on the kitchen floor. As this part of the building was of stone, it could not be fired, so that the savages were powerless unless they could force their way in by the passage, and that they had tried unsuccessfully to do.
George remembered to have heard that wounded men suffer fearfully from thirst. There was a cedar bucket full of water on a shelf in the larger passage, with a gourd hanging by it. He told Jake to put the bucket by Black Bear, and although the Indian had sat perfectly still, not showing, even by a contraction of the brows, the agony he was suffering from his wound, he gulped the water down eagerly.
The crack of musket-shots on the other side of the house could now be heard, and it was evident that the fight was renewed, but at the same time dark faces appeared at the opening into the covered way. George, loading the swivel himself, pointed it, and, by way of a salutary warning, sent a four-pound shot screaming through the kitchen. Not an Indian showed himself after that. They had met resistance on the other side of the house too, and as the moon went slowly down the horizon in the pale gray of dawn the watchers from the eye-holes saw them draw off and take their way rapidly across the white ground into the mountains. The snow was blood-stained in many places, showing that the musketry fire had been very effective; but the Indians were so skilful in concealing their losses, and so stoical in regard to their wounds, that it was hard to tell exactly how they had fared, except that they had been driven off.
Just as day was breaking Lord Fairfax came to George.
“You have had your first taste of ball-cartridges,” said he, smiling. “What do you think of it?”
George hesitated and remained silent for a moment.
“At first,” he said, “I hardly knew what I was doing. Afterwards, it seemed to me, I had never thought so quickly in my life.”