"For God's sake, Boyd!" I shouted. "Break through there beside the Yellow Moth!"
Boyd, wielding his clubbed rifle, cleared a circle amid the crowding savages; Sergeant Parker ran out into the yelling crush; the two gigantic riflemen, Murphy and Elerson, swinging their terrible weapons like flails, smashed their way forward; behind them, using knife, hatchet, and stock, I led out the last men living on that knoll—Ned McDonald, Garrett Putnam, Jack Youse, and a French coureur-de-bois whose name I have never learned.
All around us raged and yelled the maddened Seneca pack, slashing each other again and again in their crazed attempts to reach us. The Yellow Moth was stabbed through and through a hundred times, yet the ghastly corpse still kept its feet, so terrible was the crushing pressure on every side.
Suddenly, tearing a path through the frenzied mob, I saw a mob of cursing, sweating, green-coated soldiers and rangers, struggling toward us—saw one of Butler's rangers seize Sergeant Parker by the collar of his hunting shirt, bawling out:
"Hurrah! Hurrah! Prisoner taken from Morgan's corps!"
Another, an officer of British regulars, I think, threw himself on Boyd, shouting:
"By heaven! It's Boyd of Derry! Are you not Tom Boyd, of Derry, Pennsylvania?"
"Yes, you bloody-backed Tory!" retorted Boyd, struggling to knife him under his gorget. "And I'm Boyd of Morgan's, too!"
I aimed a blow at the red-coated officer, but my rifle stock broke off across the skull of an Indian; and I began to beat a path toward Boyd with the steel barrel of my weapon, Murphy and Elerson raging forward beside me in such a very whirlwind of half-crazed fury that the Indians gave way and leaped aside, trying to shoot at us.
Headlong through this momentary opening rushed Garrett Putnam, his rifle-dress torn from his naked body, his heavy knife dripping in the huge fist that clutched it. After him leaped Ned McDonald, the coureur-de-bois, and Jack Youse, letting drive right and left with their hatchets. And, as the painted crowd ahead recoiled and shrank aside, Murphy, Elerson, and I went through, smashing out the way with our heavy weapons.