The Last of the Mohicans; A narrative of 1757
“Give me the range!” said Hawkeye, bending to catch a glimpse of
the direction, and then instantly moving onward.
Cries, oaths, voices calling to each other, and the reports of muskets, were
now quick and incessant, and, apparently, on every side of them. Suddenly a
strong glare of light flashed across the scene, the fog rolled upward in thick
wreaths, and several cannons belched across the plain, and the roar was thrown
heavily back from the bellowing echoes of the mountain.
“’Tis from the fort!” exclaimed Hawkeye, turning short on his
tracks; “and we, like stricken fools, were rushing to the woods, under
the very knives of the Maquas.”
The instant their mistake was rectified, the whole party retraced the error
with the utmost diligence. Duncan willingly relinquished the support of Cora to
the arm of Uncas and Cora as readily accepted the welcome assistance. Men, hot
and angry in pursuit, were evidently on their footsteps, and each instant
threatened their capture, if not their destruction.
“Point de quartier aux coquins!” cried an eager pursuer, who seemed
to direct the operations of the enemy.
“Stand firm, and be ready, my gallant Sixtieths!” suddenly
exclaimed a voice above them; “wait to see the enemy, fire low and sweep
the glacis.”
“Father! father!” exclaimed a piercing cry from out the mist:
“it is I! Alice! thy own Elsie! Spare, oh! save your daughters!”
“Hold!” shouted the former speaker, in the awful tones of parental
agony, the sound reaching even to the woods, and rolling back in solemn echo.
“’Tis she! God has restored me to my children! Throw open the
sally-port; to the field, Sixtieths, to the field; pull not a trigger, lest ye
kill my lambs! Drive off these dogs of France with your steel.”
Duncan heard the grating of the rusty hinges, and darting to the spot, directed
by the sound, he met a long line of dark red warriors, passing swiftly toward
the glacis. He knew them for his own battalion of the Royal Americans, and
flying to their head, soon swept every trace of his pursuers from before the
works.
For an instant, Cora and Alice had stood trembling and bewildered by this
unexpected desertion; but before either had leisure for speech, or even
thought, an officer of gigantic frame, whose locks were bleached with years and
service, but whose air of military grandeur had been rather softened than
destroyed by time, rushed out of the body of mist, and folded them to his
bosom, while large scalding tears rolled down his pale and wrinkled cheeks, and
he exclaimed, in the peculiar accent of Scotland:
“For this I thank thee, Lord! Let danger come as it will, thy servant is
now prepared!”
CHAPTER XV.
“Then go we in, to know his embassy;
Which I could, with ready guess, declare,
Before the Frenchmen speak a word of it.”
—King Henry V
A few succeeding days were passed amid the privations, the uproar, and the
dangers of the siege, which was vigorously pressed by a power, against whose
approaches Munro possessed no competent means of resistance. It appeared as if
Webb, with his army, which lay slumbering on the banks of the Hudson, had
utterly forgotten the strait to which his countrymen were reduced. Montcalm had
filled the woods of the portage with his savages, every yell and whoop from
whom rang through the British encampment, chilling the hearts of men who were
already but too much disposed to magnify the danger.
Not so, however, with the besieged. Animated by the words, and stimulated by
the examples of their leaders, they had found their courage, and maintained
their ancient reputation, with a zeal that did justice to the stern character
of their commander. As if satisfied with the toil of marching through the
wilderness to encounter his enemy, the French general, though of approved
skill, had neglected to seize the adjacent mountains; whence the besieged might
have been exterminated with impunity, and which, in the more modern warfare of
the country, would not have been neglected for a single hour. This sort of
contempt for eminences, or rather dread of the labor of ascending them, might
have been termed the besetting weakness of the warfare of the period. It
originated in the simplicity of the Indian contests, in which, from the nature
of the combats, and the density of the forests, fortresses were rare, and
artillery next to useless. The carelessness engendered by these usages
descended even to the war of the Revolution and lost the States the important
fortress of Ticonderoga opening a way for the army of Burgoyne into what was
then the bosom of the country. We look back at this ignorance, or infatuation,
whichever it may be called, with wonder, knowing that the neglect of an
eminence, whose difficulties, like those of Mount Defiance, have been so
greatly exaggerated, would, at the present time, prove fatal to the reputation
of the engineer who had planned the works at their base, or to that of the
general whose lot it was to defend them.
The tourist, the valetudinarian, or the amateur of the beauties of nature, who,
in the train of his four-in-hand, now rolls through the scenes we have
attempted to describe, in quest of information, health, or pleasure, or floats
steadily toward his object on those artificial waters which have sprung up
under the administration of a statesman[1]
who has dared to stake his political character on the hazardous issue, is not
to suppose that his ancestors traversed those hills, or struggled with the same
currents with equal facility. The transportation of a single heavy gun was
often considered equal to a victory gained; if happily, the difficulties of the
passage had not so far separated it from its necessary concomitant, the
ammunition, as to render it no more than a useless tube of unwieldy iron.
[1]
Evidently the late De Witt Clinton, who died governor of New York in 1828.
The evils of this state of things pressed heavily on the fortunes of the
resolute Scotsman who now defended William Henry. Though his adversary
neglected the hills, he had planted his batteries with judgment on the plain,
and caused them to be served with vigor and skill. Against this assault, the
besieged could only oppose the imperfect and hasty preparations of a fortress
in the wilderness.
It was in the afternoon of the fifth day of the siege, and the fourth of his
own service in it, that Major Heyward profited by a parley that had just been
beaten, by repairing to the ramparts of one of the water bastions, to breathe
the cool air from the lake, and to take a survey of the progress of the siege.
He was alone, if the solitary sentinel who paced the mound be excepted; for the
artillerists had hastened also to profit by the temporary suspension of their
arduous duties. The evening was delightfully calm, and the light air from the
limpid water fresh and soothing. It seemed as if, with the termination of the
roar of artillery and the plunging of shot, nature had also seized the moment
to assume her mildest and most captivating form. The sun poured down his
parting glory on the scene, without the oppression of those fierce rays that
belong to the climate and the season. The mountains looked green, and fresh,
and lovely, tempered with the milder light, or softened in shadow, as thin
vapors floated between them and the sun. The numerous islands rested on the
bosom of the Horican, some low and sunken, as if embedded in the waters, and
others appearing to hover about the element, in little hillocks of green
velvet; among which the fishermen of the beleaguering army peacefully rowed
their skiffs, or floated at rest on the glassy mirror in quiet pursuit of their
employment.
The scene was at once animated and still. All that pertained to nature was
sweet, or simply grand; while those parts which depended on the temper and
movements of man were lively and playful.
Two little spotless flags were abroad, the one on a salient angle of the fort,
and the other on the advanced battery of the besiegers; emblems of the truth
which existed, not only to the acts, but it would seem, also, to the enmity of
the combatants.
Behind these again swung, heavily opening and closing in silken folds, the
rival standards of England and France.
A hundred gay and thoughtless young Frenchmen were drawing a net to the pebbly
beach, within dangerous proximity to the sullen but silent cannon of the fort,
while the eastern mountain was sending back the loud shouts and gay merriment
that attended their sport. Some were rushing eagerly to enjoy the aquatic games
of the lake, and others were already toiling their way up the neighboring
hills, with the restless curiosity of their nation. To all these sports and
pursuits, those of the enemy who watched the besieged, and the besieged
themselves, were, however, merely the idle though sympathizing spectators. Here
and there a picket had, indeed, raised a song, or mingled in a dance, which had
drawn the dusky savages around them, from their lairs in the forest. In short,
everything wore rather the appearance of a day of pleasure, than of an hour
stolen from the dangers and toil of a bloody and vindictive warfare.
Duncan had stood in a musing attitude, contemplating this scene a few minutes,
when his eyes were directed to the glacis in front of the sally-port already
mentioned, by the sounds of approaching footsteps. He walked to an angle of the
bastion, and beheld the scout advancing, under the custody of a French officer,
to the body of the fort. The countenance of Hawkeye was haggard and careworn,
and his air dejected, as though he felt the deepest degradation at having
fallen into the power of his enemies. He was without his favorite weapon, and
his arms were even bound behind him with thongs, made of the skin of a deer.
The arrival of flags to cover the messengers of summons, had occurred so often
of late, that when Heyward first threw his careless glance on this group, he
expected to see another of the officers of the enemy, charged with a similar
office but the instant he recognized the tall person and still sturdy though
downcast features of his friend, the woodsman, he started with surprise, and
turned to descend from the bastion into the bosom of the work.
The sounds of other voices, however, caught his attention, and for a moment
caused him to forget his purpose. At the inner angle of the mound he met the
sisters, walking along the parapet, in search, like himself, of air and relief
from confinement. They had not met from that painful moment when he deserted
them on the plain, only to assure their safety. He had parted from them worn
with care, and jaded with fatigue; he now saw them refreshed and blooming,
though timid and anxious. Under such an inducement it will cause no surprise
that the young man lost sight for a time, of other objects in order to address
them. He was, however, anticipated by the voice of the ingenuous and youthful
Alice.
“Ah! thou tyrant! thou recreant knight! he who abandons his damsels in
the very lists,” she cried; “here have we been days, nay, ages,
expecting you at our feet, imploring mercy and forgetfulness of your craven
backsliding, or I should rather say, backrunning—for verily you fled in
the manner that no stricken deer, as our worthy friend the scout would say,
could equal!”
“You know that Alice means our thanks and our blessings,” added the
graver and more thoughtful Cora. “In truth, we have a little wonder why
you should so rigidly absent yourself from a place where the gratitude of the
daughters might receive the support of a parent’s thanks.”
“Your father himself could tell you, that, though absent from your
presence, I have not been altogether forgetful of your safety,” returned
the young man; “the mastery of yonder village of huts,” pointing to