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The heavy wooden gates, closed with stout bars, were flanked without by the block-houses and within by small windows cut in the nearest cabins. The houses had sharp, sloping roofs, made of huge clapboards, and these great wooden slabs were kept in place by long poles, bound with withes to the rafters. In case of dire need each cabin was separately defensible.

In this manner an hour or two passed away, without any event occurring worth being recorded, when a voice shouted joyfully: "The Lexington reinforcements are at hand!" In a moment the whole station was in commotion men, women, and children rushing to the block-houses and pallisades nearest to and overlooking the long lane just mentioned.

The quick eye of the haughty man had already rested on the group of officers drawn by the scream of the supplicant. Numbers, too, of the men, attracted by the same cause, were collected in front of their respective block-houses, and looking from the windows of the rooms in which they were also breakfasting, preparatory to the expedition.

Kinzie, when they took command of the block-houses which overlooked the esplanade on which the council was held, opened the port-holes, and pointed the cannon so as to command the whole assembly. By this means, probably, the lives of the whites who were present in council were preserved.

It was but a few minutes after the surrender of the block-houses when the trestles were a mass of flames. They were immense structures, each nearly fifteen hundred feet long, and from eighty to ninety feet high. Thus the object of the expedition had been gained. Again the Louisville and Nashville Railroad was rendered useless to Rosecrans’s army. But Morgan’s danger had just commenced.

One night I got a detail of sixty men from the First, Ninth, and Tenth, whose officers always helped us in every way, and with these, and with sixty of my own men, I dug a long, zigzag trench in advance of the salient of my line out to a knoll well in front, from which we could command the Spanish trenches and block-houses immediately ahead of us.

It becomes us to reform ourselves, to abstain from all that is wrong, and to protect our villages with proper defences. Let us build block-houses wherever they are needed and not permit any armed Indian to enter the European settlements."

It was a continuous line of block-houses connected by barbed wire, to prevent the Boers crossing the railway lines, and virtually corralling their forces in certain districts until want of food forced them to surrender. Captain Reitz asserts that the block-house system did more to end the war than the whole British Army.

Over a little bridge the stranger idled, looking curiously about him. The great trading-house attracted his attention, with its narrow picket lane leading to the door; the storehouse surrounded by a protective log fence; the fort itself, a medley of heavy-timbered stockades and square block-houses. After a moment he resumed his strolling.

And now from Stabroek, where old Mansfeid lay with his army, all the way across the flooded country, ran the great bulwark, strengthened with new palisade-work and block-houses, bristling with Spanish cannon, pike, and arquebus, even to the bank of the Scheldt, in the immediate vicinity of Fort Lille. That fortress and the whole line of the Kowenstyn were held in the iron grip of Mondragon.