Freed from his death-grip, I stood breathing convulsively, hands clinched, one foot on my fallen rifle. An Indian ran past me, chased by Elerson and Murphy, but the savage dodged into the underbrush, shrieking, "Oonah! Oonah! Oonah!" and Elerson came back, waving his deer-hide cap.
Everywhere Tories, Royal Greens, and Indians were running into the woods; the wailing cry, "Oonah! Oonah!" rose on all sides now. Gardinier's Caughnawaga men were shooting rapidly; the Palatines, master of their reeking brush-field, poured a heavy fire into the detachment of retreating Greens, who finally broke and ran, dropping sack and rifle in their flight, and leaving thirty of their dead under the feet of the Palatines.
The soldiers of the Canajoharie regiment came up, swarming over a wooded knoll on the right, only to halt and stand, silently leaning on their rifles.
For the battle of Oriskany was over.
There was no cheering from the men of Tryon County. Their victory had been too dearly bought; their losses too terrible; their triumph sterile, for they could not now advance the crippled fragments of their regiments and raise the siege in the face of St. Leger's regulars and Walter Butler's Rangers.
Their combat with Johnson's Greens and Brant's Mohawks had been fought; and, though masters of the field, they could do no more than hold their ground. Perhaps the bitter knowledge that they must leave Stanwix to its fate, and that, too, through their own disobedience, made the better soldiers of them in time. But it was a hard and dreadful lesson; and I saw men crying, faces hidden in their powder-blackened hands, as the dying General was borne through the ranks, lying gray and motionless on his hemlock litter.
And this is all that I myself witnessed of that shameful ambuscade and murderous combat, fought some two miles north of the dirty camp, and now known as the Battle of Oriskany.
That night we buried our dead; one hundred on the field where they had fallen, two hundred and fifty in the burial trenches at Oriskany--thirty-five wagon-loads in all. Scarcely an officer of rank remained to lead the funeral march when the muffled drums of the Palatines rolled at midnight, and the smoky torches moved, and the dead-wagons rumbled on through the suffocating darkness of a starless night. We had few wounded; we took no prisoners; Oriskany meant death. We counted only thirty men disabled and some score missing.
"God grant the missing be safely dead," prayed our camp chaplain at the burial trench. We knew what that meant; worse than dead were the wretched men who had fallen alive into the hands of old John Butler and his son, Walter, and that vicious drunkard, Barry St. Leger, who had offered, over his own signature, two hundred and forty dollars a dozen for prime Tryon County scalps.
I slept little that night, partly from the excitement of my first serious combat, partly because of the terrible heat. Our outposts, now painfully overzealous and alert, fired off their muskets at every fancied sound or movement, and these continual alarms kept me awake, though Mount and Murphy slept peacefully, and Elerson yawned on guard.