The two companies of Virginia militia were marching and counter-marching at "support," halberdiers guiding, drummers and fifers leading off, and a long, lean major pacing to and fro, and watching the two captains with keen, wrinkled eyes.
The militia were mostly Virginians born, tall, stout fellows, smartly uniformed in drab and scarlet, and wearing the bugle on their cross-belts, indicating them to be light infantry. Truly, they wheeled and halted and marched and counter-marched most adroitly, carefully preserving distances and alignment; and I thought the major a martinet that he found nothing but fault with the officers and men. Certainly they paraded perfectly, their black knee-gaitered legs moving in unison, their muskets steady, their left arms swinging as one, which interested me because, in our militia of Tryon County, to swing the free arm is not allowed.
But I had no business to linger here; I felt that every minute redoubled my danger. Yet again I asked myself where under heaven I could go, and I thought bitterly of Mount for leaving me here neglected.
Plainly the first thing to be done was to get out of the fort. This I accomplished without the slightest trouble, nobody questioning me; and I shortly found myself in the road which appeared to be the main street of Cresap's village.
The fort, I now perceived, stood on a low hill in the centre of cleared ground. The road encircled the fort, then ran west through a roughly cultivated country, dotted with cabins of logs plastered over with blue clay. The circumference of the village itself appeared to be inconsiderable. Everywhere the dark circle of the forest seemed to crowd in the desolate hamlet; I say desolate, for indeed the scene was grim, even for the frontier. The whole country had a black appearance from the thousands of charred roots and stumps which choked the fields. Dead trees lay in heaps, stark patches of dead pines stood like gray spectres, blasted hemlocks, with foliage seared rusty, lined the landscape, marking the zones doomed to cultivation. These latter were girdled trees, but I saw no attempt to preserve any trees for shade around the cabins, or for shade along the fences, or for beauty.
We in Johnstown never girdled the bush without preserving rows of trees to ornament roads and fields, and this dismal destruction by fire and axe reacted on my sombre thoughts, depressing me dolefully.
Under a leaden sky, through which a pale sun peered fitfully, the blackened waste about me seemed horrible and ominous of horrors to come; the very soil in the fields was black with charcoal, through which the young corn struggled up into the fading sunshine as though strangling.
Cresap's Maryland colonists were busy everywhere with harrow and plough and axe and spade. The encircling woods echoed and re-echoed with their chopping; their voices rang out, guiding the slow ox-teams among the stumps. At intervals the crack of a rifle signalled the death of some partridge or squirrel close by.
There were men in the fields labouring half-naked at the unyielding roots; men in linen shirts and smalls, planting or weeding; men moving in distant fields, aimlessly perhaps, perhaps planning a rough home, perhaps a grave.
Women sometimes passed along the paths, urging gaunt cattle to gaunter pasture; children peered from high door-sills, hung from unpainted windows, quarrelled in bare door-yards, half seen through stockades; some chopped fire-wood, some carried water, some played in the ditches or sailed chips in the dark, slow stream that crawled out across the land towards the Ohio.