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"What help could he bring?" asked the captain. Willet shook his head. "I can't answer you there," he replied; "but the smoke has significance for us. Of that I feel sure. By sundown we'll know what it means." "And that's only about two hours away," said Captain Colden. "Whatever happens we'll hold out to the last. I suppose, though, that St. Luc's force also will see the smoke."
Willet and Tayoga looked at Robert and he knew they expected him to fill his usual role of spokesman. The words rushed to his lips, but they were held there by embarrassment. The soldiers who had been awakened were already going back to sleep. Captain Colden sat down on a log and waited for them to state their wants. Then Robert spoke, knowing they could not afford to delay.
Captain Colden did not forget to be grateful to Willet for his insistence that the soldiers should always lie low, as the hostile lead, instead of striking, now merely sent a harmless shower upon them. But the fusillade was brief, Robert, in truth, judging that it had been against the commands of St. Luc, who was too wise a leader to wish ammunition to be wasted in random firing.
"General Braddock's army exists no longer." "What? It's some evil jest. Say it's not true, Lennox!" "It's an evil jest, but it's not mine, Colden. It's the jest of fate. General Braddock walked into a trap it's twice I've told the terrible tale, once to Black Rifle and now to you and he and his army were destroyed, all but a fragment of it that is now fleeing from the woods."
He had refused what he had a right to refuse, and what had been pressed upon the giver rather than sought by him. The mere separation was agreeable to Colden, and the rage that accompanied it was excited by the young man's steadiness in his fidelity to you. You were not aware that this cause of anger could not be removed by any thing done by you. Golden was not sensible of any fault.
As he, Colden, Wilton and Carson watched at the palisade he was in fear lest a triumphant shout from the Indian lines would show that the hunter and the Onondaga had been trapped. But the long hours passed without an alarm and about three o'clock in the morning two shadows appeared at the palisade and whispered to them. Robert felt great relief as Willet and Tayoga climbed silently over.
The full horror of that dreadful scene in the forest returned to him for a moment, and, despite himself, he made tone and manner dramatic. A long, deep gasp, like a groan, came from the crowd, and then Robert heard the sound of a woman on the outskirts weeping. "Our army destroyed!" repeated Colden mechanically. "And the whole border is laid bare to the French and Indian hosts," said Robert.
Robert, seeing that the line on the flank could be held without great difficulty, left Tayoga in command, and crept back to the main force, where the bullets were coming much faster. Two of the soldiers in the center had been slain, and three had been wounded, but Captain Colden had not given ground.
Colden assured the Board of Trade that the Currency Act, so far as New York was concerned, was uncalled for and very prejudicial to colonial industry and the manufactures of England.
You're quite sure you don't wish to consult your superior officer, Captain Colden?" "Absolutely sure. It would waste the time of all of us." "Then it seems there is nothing more to say, and to use your own fanciful way of putting it, we must go back from the play of words to the play of swords." "I see no alternative." "And yet I hope that you will survive the combat, Mr. Lennox."
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