The French and their allies instantly fled.  As the colonists passed the spot where Dieskau was sitting on the ground, one of them, singularly enough himself a Frenchman, who had ten years before left Canada, fired at him and shot him through both legs.  Others came up and stripped him of his clothes, but, on learning who he was, they carried him to Johnson, who received him with the greatest kindness, and had every attention paid to him.

Chapter 11:  Scouting.

It was near five o’clock before the final rout of the French took place; but, before that time, several hundreds of the Canadians and Indians had left the scene of action, and had returned to the scene of the fight in the wood, to plunder and scalp the dead.  They were resting, after their bloody work, by a pool in the forest, when a scouting party from Fort Lyman, under Captains M’Ginnis and Folsom, came upon them and opened fire.

The Canadians and Indians, outnumbering their assailants greatly, fought for some time, but were finally defeated and fled.  M’Ginnis was mortally wounded, but continued to give orders till the fight was over.  The bodies of the slain were thrown into the pool, which to this day bears the name, “the bloody pool.”

The various bands of French fugitives reunited in the forest, and made their way back to their canoes in South Bay, and reached Ticonderoga utterly exhausted and famished, for they had thrown away their knapsacks in their flight, and had nothing to eat from the morning of the fight until they rejoined their comrades.

Johnson had the greatest difficulty in protecting the wounded French general from the Mohawks, who, although they had done no fighting in defence of the camp, wanted to torture and burn Dieskau in revenge for the death of Hendrick and their warriors who had fallen in the ambush.  He, however, succeeded in doing so, and sent him in a litter under a strong escort to Albany.  Dieskau was afterwards taken to England, and remained for some years at Bath, after which he returned to Paris.  He never, however, recovered from his numerous wounds, and died a few years later.

He always spoke in the highest terms of the kindness he had received from the colonial officers.  Of the provincial soldiers he said that, in the morning they fought like boys, about noon like men, and in the afternoon like devils.

The English loss in killed, wounded, and missing was two hundred and sixty-two, for the most part killed in the ambush in the morning.  The French, according to their own account, lost two hundred and twenty-eight, but it probably exceeded four hundred, the principal portion of whom were regulars, for the Indians and Canadians kept themselves so well under cover that they and the provincials, behind their logs, were able to inflict but little loss on each other.