True to the Old Flag | Page 8

I
can feel it rather than hear it. It is a sort of murmur no louder than a
whisper. Do you hear it, Harold?"
"I seem to hear something," Harold said. "It might be the sound of the
sea a very long way off, just as one can hear it many miles from the
coast, on a still night at home. What do you think it is?"
"If it is not fancy," Mr. Welch replied, "and I do not think that we
should all be deceived, it is an attack upon Gloucester."
"But Gloucester is thirty-five miles away," Harold answered.
"It is," Mr. Welch replied; "but on so still a night as this sounds can be
heard from an immense distance. If it is not this, I cannot say what it
is."
Upon the following night, just as Mr. Welch's watch was at an end, a
low whistle was heard near the gate.
"Who is there?" Mr. Welch at once challenged.
"Jack Pearson, and the sooner you open the gate the better. There's no
saying where these red devils may be lying round."
Harold and the farmer instantly ran down and opened the gate.
"I should advise you to stop down here," the hunter said as they
replaced the bars. "If you did not hear me you certainly would not hear
the redskins, and they'd all be over the palisade before you had time to
fire a shot. I'm glad to see you safe, for I was badly skeared lest I
should find nothing but a heap of ashes here."
The next two men now turned out, and Mr. Welch led his visitor into
the house and struck a light.
"Halloo, Pearson! you must have been in a skirmish," he said, seeing

that the hunter's head was bound up with a bloodstained bandage.
"It was all that," Pearson said, "and wuss. I went down to Gloucester
and told 'em what I had heard, but the darned fools tuk it as quiet as if
all King George's troops with fixed bayonets had been camped round
'em. The council got together and palavered for an hour, and concluded
that there was no chance whatever of the Iroquois venturing to attack
such a powerful place as Gloucester. I told 'em that the redskins would
go over their stockade at a squirrel's jump, and that as War Eagle alone
had at least 150 braves, while there warn't more than 50 able-bodied
men in Gloucester and all the farms around it, things would go bad with
'em if they didn't mind. But bless yer, they knew more than I did about
it. Most of 'em had moved from the East and had never seen an Injun in
his war-paint. Gloucester had never been attacked since it was founded
nigh ten years ago, and they didn't see no reason why it should be
attacked now. There was a few old frontiersmen like myself among 'em
who did their best to stir 'em up, but it was no manner of good. When
the council was over we put our heads together, and just went through
the township a-talking to the women, and we hadn't much difficulty in
getting up such a skear among 'em that before nightfall every one of
'em in the farms around made their husbands move into the stockade of
the village.
"When the night passed off quietly most of the men were just as savage
with us as if it had been a false alarm altogether. I p'inted out that it was
not because War Eagle had left 'em alone that night that he was bound
to do so the next night or any night after. But in spite of the women
they would have started out to their farms the fust thing in the morning,
if a man hadn't come in with the news that Carter's farm had been
burned and the whole of the people killed and scalped. As Carter's farm
lay only about fifteen miles off this gave 'em a skear, and they were as
ready now to believe in the Injuns as I had tried to make 'em the night
before. Then they asked us old hands to take the lead and promised to
do what we told 'em, but when it came to it their promises were not
worth the breath they had spent upon 'em. There were eight or ten
houses outside the stockade, and in course we wanted these pulled
down; but they wouldn't hear of it. Howsomever, we got 'em to work to

strengthen the stockades, to make loop-holes in the houses near 'em, to
put up barricades from house to house, and to prepare generally for a
fight. We divided into three watches.
"Well, just as I expected, about eleven o'clock at night the Injuns
attacked.