The scene was real enough to me now.  Jack Mount, kneeling beside me, was attempting to clean the blood from himself and Elerson with handfuls of dried leaves.  Murphy lay on his belly, watching the forest in front of us, and his blue eyes seemed suffused with a light of their own in the deepening gloom of the gathering thunder-storm.  My nerves were all a-quiver; the awful screaming from the ravine had never ceased for an instant, and in that darkening, slimy pit I could still see a swaying mass of men on the causeway, locked in a death-struggle.  To and fro they reeled; hatchet and knife and gun-stock glittered, rising and falling in the twilight of the storm-cloud; the flames from the rifles flashed crimson.

“Kape ye’re eyes to the front, sorr; they do be comin’!” cried Murphy, springing briskly to his feet.

I looked ahead into the darkening woods; the Caughnawaga men were falling back, taking station behind trees; Mount stepped to the shelter of a big oak; Elerson leaped to cover under a pine; a Caughnawaga bateaux-man darted past me, stationing himself on my right behind the trunk of a dapple beech.  Suddenly an Indian showed himself close in front; the Caughnawaga man fired and missed; and, quicker than I can write it, the savage was on him before he could reload and had brained him with a single castete-stroke.  I fired, but the Mohawk was too quick for me, and a moment later he bounded back into the brush while the forest rang with his triumphant scalp-yell.

“That’s what they’re doing in front!” shouted Elerson.  “When a soldier fires they’re on him before he can reload!”

“Two men to a tree!” roared Jack Mount.  “Double up there, you Caughnawaga men!”

Elerson glided cautiously to the oak which sheltered Mount; Murphy crept forward to my tree.

“Bedad!” he muttered, “let the ondacent divils dhraw ye’re fire an’ welcome.  I’ve a pill to purge ’em now.  Luk at that, sorr!  Shteady!  Shteady an’ cool does it!”

A savage, with his face painted half white and half red, stepped out from the thicket and dropped just as I fired.  The next instant he came leaping straight for our tree, castete poised.

Murphy fired.  The effect of the shot was amazing; the savage stopped short in mid-career as though he had come into collision with a stone wall; then Elerson fired, knocking him flat, head doubled under his naked shoulders, feet trailing across a rotting log.

“Save ye’re powther, Dave!” sang out Murphy.  “Sure he was clean kilt as he shtood there.  Lave a dead man take his own time to fall!”

I had reloaded, and Murphy was coolly priming, when on our right the rifles began speaking faster and faster, and I heard the sound of men running hard over the dry leaves, and the thudding gallop of horses.

“A charge!” said Murphy.  “There do be horses comin’, too.  Have they dhragoons?—­I dunnoa.  Ha!  There they go!  ’Tis McCraw’s outlaws or I’m a Dootchman!”