What was done at Macgowan’s Ford in the gray of the morning of February first, 1781, has become a page in our history.  But I protest that not any of the chroniclers do even-handed justice to the little band of patriot riflemen doing their utmost to hold a hundred-to-one outnumbering host in check.

’Twas a fine sight, be the onlooker Whig or Tory.  The Guards, led by the fiery Irishman, O’Hara, took the water first, the men crowding shoulder to shoulder to brace against the sweep of the current which, on the western side of the stream, was little less than a mill-tail for swiftness.  After them came the foot and horse in solid squares, and always with more to follow.  None the less, our little handful did not blanch; and when the Guards in midstream held straight across instead of bearing to the right as the ford ran, a shout went up on our side and the fifty hastened up from the ford-head as one man to face the enemy squarely.

Now it was that the brown-barreled rifles began to crack and spit fire; and I do think if we had had our other two hundred and fifty out of that back field on the manor lands, we might at least have made the wading redcoats hurry a little.  Indeed, as it was, the van of the Guards broke here and there, and we could hear O’Hara berating his men as only a battle-mad Irishman can, with blarneyings and curses intermingled.

Having no firearms save our wetted pistols, Jennifer and I crouched in cover, waiting to do what two swordsmen might when the blade’s length should bridge the fast-narrowing distance between us and the advancing host.

’Twas in this little interval of forced inaction that we heard a most familiar voice issuing from a clump of holly just below our covert; a voice lifted now in fervent prayer and again in Scriptural anathema on the foe.

“’Let God arise and let His inimies be scattered....  Let them be as the chaff upon a threshing-floor’—­”

The sharp crack of the old borderer’s rifle filled the momentary pause, and a British officer in a colonel’s uniform swayed drunkenly in his saddle and plunged headlong in the stream.

“’Let them be as the children of Amalek before the Mighty One of Israel:  make them and their princes like Oreb and Zeeb; yea, make all their princes like as Zebah and Zalmunna....  O my God, make them like unto a wheel, and as the stubble before the wind; like as the fire that burneth up the wood, and as the flame that consumeth the mountains.’”

Crack! went the long-barreled piece again, and again an officer hallooing on his floundering battalion bent to his saddle horn and slipped into the turbid flood.

My gorge rose.  This picking off of officers has always seemed to me the savagest of war’s barbarities.  How Richard divined my thought and purpose, I know not; but when I would have slipped down to Yeates’s holly bush he laid a detaining hand on my arm.

“Let be,” he said; “’tis murder, if you like, but all war is that.  When old Eph’s turn comes, they will kill him as relentlessly as he is killing them.”