One of them fell, and his companions ran away.

Fernando continued his flight until nearly night, when he fell in with four Kentuckians, who had escaped the massacre, and they proceeded to the Maumee Rapids, where General Harrison was building Fort Meigs.

Fernando was in the fort when it was besieged several weeks later by Proctor and Tecumseh with fully two thousand men.  General Clay coming to his assistance on the 5th of May, Proctor retreated.

Colonel Dudley made a sortie from Fort Meigs on the same day and was drawn into an ambuscade.  He was mortally wounded and lost six hundred and fifty men.

Mr. Madison, who had been re-elected president of the United States, showed a disposition to prosecute the war with great vigor.  While the success of the Americans on land was not very encouraging, to the surprise of everybody, their greatest achievements were on water.  England’s boasted navies seemed to have become second to the American war-vessels.  On Lake Erie, Commodore Oliver Perry, in command of an inferior fleet, had won a signal victory over Commodore Barclay after a long and hotly contested battle.  There has never been such a remarkable naval victory on fresh water.  Perry’s famous dispatch to General Harrison, “We have met the enemy and they are ours,” has become a proverb.

Shortly after the repulse of Proctor, Fernando, who had taken a place in another company, was sent to Fort Stephenson, then commanded by Major George Croghan, a regular army officer only twenty-one years of age.  Proctor’s dusky allies marched across the country to assist the British in the siege of the fort; and when, on the afternoon of the 31st, the British transports and gunboats appeared at a turn in the river a mile from the fort, the woods were swarming with Indians.

[Illustration:  JAMES MADISON.]

Within the fort, all were calm, pale, yet determined.  Only one hundred and sixty men were there to oppose the hosts of Proctor and Tecumseh.  Proctor sent a demand to the fort for surrender, accompanied by the usual threat of massacre by the Indians in case of refusal.  To his surprise, Major Croghan sent a defiant refusal.  A cannonade from the gunboats and howitzers which the British had landed commenced.

All night long the great guns played upon the fort without any serious effect, occasionally answered by the solitary six-pound cannon of the garrison, which was rapidly shifted from one block house to another, to give the impression that the fort was armed with several guns.  During the night, the British dragged three six-pound cannon to a point higher than the fort to open on it in the morning.

It was a trying night for Fernando.  All night long, the incessant thunder of cannon shook the air, and the great balls, striking the sides of the earthworks, or bursting over their heads, presented a scene grand but awful.