After leaving Venango on his return, he found the horses so weak that, to arrive the sooner, he left them and their drivers in charge of Vanbraam and pushed forward on foot, accompanied by Gist alone.  Each was wrapped to the throat in an Indian “matchcoat,” with a gun in his hand and a pack at his back.  Passing an old Indian hamlet called Murdering Town, they had an adventure which threatened to make good the name.  A French Indian, whom they met in the forest, fired at them, pretending that his gun had gone off by chance.  They caught him, and Gist would have killed him; but Washington interposed, and they let him go.[137] Then, to escape pursuit from his tribesmen, they walked all night and all the next day.  This brought them to the banks of the Alleghany.  They hoped to have found it dead frozen; but it was all alive and turbulent, filled with ice sweeping down the current.  They made a raft, shoved out into the stream, and were soon caught helplessly in the drifting ice.  Washington, pushing hard with his setting-pole, was jerked into the freezing river; but caught a log of the raft, and dragged himself out.  By no efforts could they reach the farther bank, or regain that which they had left; but they were driven against an island, where they landed, and left the raft to its fate.  The night was excessively cold, and Gist’s feet and hands were badly frost-bitten.  In the morning, the ice had set, and the river was a solid floor.  They crossed it, and succeeded in reaching the house of the trader Fraser, on the Monongahela.  It was the middle of January when Washington arrived at Williamsburg and made his report to Dinwiddie.

[Footnote 137:  Journal of Mr. Christopher Gist, in Mass.  Hist.  Coll., 3rd Series, V.]

Robert Dinwiddie was lieutenant-governor of Virginia, in place of the titular governor, Lord Albermarle, whose post was a sinecure.  He had been clerk in a government office in the West Indies; then surveyor of customs in the “Old Dominion,”—­a position in which he made himself cordially disliked; and when he rose to the governorship he carried his unpopularity with him.  Yet Virginia and all the British colonies owed him much; for, though past sixty, he was the most watchful sentinel against French aggression and its most strenuous opponent.  Scarcely had Marin’s vanguard appeared at Presquisle, when Dinwiddie warned the Home Government of the danger, and urged, what he had before urged in vain on the Virginian Assembly, the immediate building of forts on the Ohio.  There came in reply a letter, signed by the King, authorizing him to build the forts at the cost of the Colony, and to repel force by force in case he was molested or obstructed.  Moreover, the King wrote, “If you shall find that any number of persons shall presume to erect any fort or forts within the limits of our province of Virginia, you are first to require of them peaceably to depart; and if, notwithstanding your admonitions, they do still endeavor to carry out any such unlawful and unjustifiable designs, we do hereby strictly charge and command you to drive them off by force of arms."[138]