Chapter 18: The Halting of the Fleet

Adam Colfax had been making slow progress up the Ohio, far slower than he had hoped, and his brave soul was worn by hardships and troubled by apprehensions. A great hurricane had caused him serious alarm for his smaller boats. They had been saved from sinking with the greatest difficulty, and the precious stores had to be kept well and guarded well.

He was grieved and troubled, too, over the disappearance of the five, the valiant five who had continually been doing him such great service from the very moment of the start at New Orleans. He liked them all, and he mourned them for their own sakes as well. He also realized quickly that he had lost more than the five themselves. His fleet seemed to have come into a very nest of dangers. Men who went ashore to hunt never returned. At narrow points in the river they were fired upon from the dense forest on the bank, and if they sent a strong force ashore, they found nothing. If they camped at night, bullets drew blood or scattered the coals at their feet.

Invisible but none the less terrible foes hung upon them continually, and weakened their spirits. The men in the fleet were willing and eager to fight a foe whom they could see, but to be stung to death by invisible hornets was the worst of fates.

Adam Colfax missed the “eyes of the fleet” more and more every day. If Henry Ware and Shif’less Sol and their comrades had been there, they could have discovered these unseen foes, and they could have told him what to do. At night he often saw signal fires, blazing on either side of the Ohio and, although he did not know what they meant, he felt sure that they were lighted by his enemies, who were talking to one another.

Two or three of his men who had been originally woodsmen of the great valley told him that the allied tribes had come to destroy him. They had seen certain signs in the forest that could not be mistaken. The woods were full of warriors. They had heard, too, that further on was a fort on the river bank which the Indians had probably taken by this time, and which they would certainly use against the fleet. Adam Colfax wished once more for the five, who were more familiar than anybody else with the country, and who were such magnificent scouts. Never had he felt their absence more.

He came at last to the narrowest place in the river that he had yet seen, enclosed on either bank by jutting hills. As the fleet approached this watery pass a tremendous fire was opened upon it from either shore. The bullets not only came from the level of the water, but from the tops of the hills, and the sides of the boat offered no protection against the latter. The men of the fleet returned the fire, but their lead was sent into the forest and the undergrowth, and they did not know whether it hit anything except inoffensive wood and earth.

Adam Colfax drew back. He felt that he might have forced the pass, but the loss in men and stores would be too great. It was not his chief object to fight battles even if every battle should prove a victory.

When he withdrew, the forest relapsed into silence, but when he attempted the passage again the next day he was attacked by a similar, though greater, fire. He was now in a terrible quandary. He did not wish another such desperate battle as that which he had been forced to fight on the Lower Mississippi. He might win it, but there would be a great expenditure of men and ammunition, and at this vast distance from New Orleans neither could be replaced.

He drew back to a wider part of the river and decided to wait a day or two, that is, to take counsel of delay.

Adam Colfax was proud of his fleet and the great amount of precious stores that it carried. The reinforcements after the Battle of the Bayou had raised it to more than its original strength and value. All the men had recovered from their wounds, and everybody was in splendid health. He had made up his mind that fleet and cargo should be delivered intact at Pittsburgh, otherwise he could never consider his voyage wholly a success.

The night after he fell back from the watery pass he held a council of his captains and guides on his own flat boat, which had been named the Independence. He had with him Adolphe Drouillard, a brave and devoted French Creole from New Orleans; James Tilden, a Virginian; Henry Eckford, a south Carolinian; Charles Turner, a New Yorker, and William Truesdale, and Eben Barber, New Englanders, and besides these, Nat Thrale and Ned Lyon, the best of the scouts and guides since the disappearance of the five, were present.

The fleet was anchored in the middle of the river, out of rifle shot for the present, but Adam Colfax knew very well that the enemy was in the dense wood lining either bank. He had sent skirmishers ashore in the afternoon, and they did not go many yards from the stream before they were compelled to exchange shots with the foe. Thrale and Lyon, who were on the southern bank, reported that the Indians were still thick in the forest.

“They see us here on the river,” said Thrale, “an’ ef we don’t keep well in the middle uv it they kin reach us with thar bullets. But we won’t be able to see the least speck or sign uv them.”

Adam Colfax had sighed when he heard these words, and now, as his little council gathered, it seemed that all predictions of evil were about to be fulfilled. A smoky red sun had set behind the hills, and the night, true to the promise of the sun, had come on dark and cloudy. It was not exactly the cloudiness of rain; it was rather that of heat and oppressiveness, and it had in it a certain boding quality that weighed heavily upon the spirits of Adam Colfax.

The boats were anchored in a double row in the exact center of the stream, swaying just a little with the gentle current. All those carrying sails had taken them down. Adam Colfax’s boat was outside the two lines, slightly nearer to the southern shore, but still beyond rifle shot.

While the leader sat in the stern of his boat waiting for the two scouts who were last to come, he surveyed the fleet with the anxious eyes of one who carries a great responsibility. In the darkness the boats were not much more than dark lines on the darker river. Now and then they were lighted up by flares of heat lightning, but the eyes of Adam Colfax turned away from them to the banks, those high banks thick with forest and undergrowth, which contained so many dangers, real dangers, not those of the imaginary kind, as he had ample proof. Now and then a shot, apparently as a taunt, was fired from either shore, and two or three times he heard the long, whining yell which is the most ominous of human cries. This, too, he knew, was a taunt, but in every case, cunning, ferocity and power lay behind the taunt, which was another truth that he knew.

They were all soon gathered on the deck of the little Independence, and the faces of the two scouts who came last were very grave.

“What do you think of it, Lyon?” said Adam Colfax.

Lyon gave his head one brief shake.

“We’re right in the middle of the biggest hornet’s nest the country ever saw,” he replied. “Looks ez ef we couldn’t git past without another terrible fight.”

“And you, Drouillard?” Adam Colfax asked of the Creole.

“Eet ees hard to go on,” replied Drouillard in his broken English, “but we cannot go back at all. So eet ees true that we must go on. Eet ees is the only thing we can do.”

“But how?” said Adam Colfax. “We cannot use up all the ammunition that we have in these battles. If we were to reach Pittsburgh in that condition we’d be a burden instead of a help.”

“But as Mr. Drouillard says, we can’t go back,” said Truesdale.

They sat dumbly a minute or two, no one knowing what to propose, and all looking toward the southern bank, where they believed the chief danger to lie. The dark green forest made a high black line there in the night, a solid black until it was broken by a pink dot, which they knew to be the flash of a rifle.

“They are jeering at us again,” said Adam Colfax.

“‘Tain’t no jeer, either,” said Thrale, as five or six pink dots appeared where the one had been, and faint sounds came to their ears.

Lyon confirmed the opinion of his brother scout.

“So many wouldn’t let off their guns at once jest fur fun,” he said. “I wonder what in tarnation it means!”

The spray of pink dots did not reappear, and they turned their minds once more to their great problem, which seemed as insoluble as ever. The flowing of the current, gentle but deep and strong, swung the Independence a little further from the two lines of boats, but those on board, in their absorption, did not notice it. Three or four minutes passed, and there was the report of a rifle shot from the southern bank, followed an instant later by another. Two bullets splashed in the water near the Independence.

“We’d better pull back a leetle,” said Drouillard. “We are drifting within range of ze warriors.”

“So we are,” said Lyon, laying his hand on a sweep. “Now, what under the moon is that?”

He pointed to a dark object, a mere black dot on the dusky surface of the river. But it was not a stationary dot, and in its movement it came toward the Independence.

“Shorely they don’t mean to come swimmin’ to attack us,” said the other guide, Thrale. “That’s a human head on top uv the water an’ thar’s a body belongin’ to it under the water. An’ see, thar’s another head behind it, an’ behind that another, an’ likely thar’s more.”

“Eet ees certainlee the warriors trying to reach us on the water,” said Adolphe Drouillard, and, raising his rifle, he took aim at the first swimming head.