. The panels of the inner door were slashed
out. A flare of {309} musketry met the Russians full in the face. The
defenders dropped to a man, fearless in death as in life, though one
wounded fellow seems to have dragged himself to the balcony where he
succeeded in firing off the cannon before he was thrown over the
palisades, to be received on the hostiles' upturned spears. Meanwhile
wads of burning birch bark and moss had been tossed into the fort on
the powder magazines. A high wind fanned the flames. A terrific
explosion shook the fort. The trap-door where the women huddled
upstairs gave way. Half the refugees fell through, where they were
either butchered or perished in the flames. The others plunged from
the burning building through the windows. A few escaped to the woods.
The rest--Aleut women, wives of the Russians--were taken captive by the
Kolosh. Ships, houses, fortress, all were in flames. By nightfall
nothing remained of Sitka but the brass and iron of the melted cannon.
The hostiles had saved loot of some two thousand sea-otter skins.

All that night, and for eight days and nights, the refugees of the
forest lay hidden under bark and moss. Under cover of darkness, one, a
herdsman, ventured down to the charred ruins of Sitka. The mangled,
headless bodies of the Russians lay in the ashes. At noon of the
eighth day the mountains suddenly rocked to the echo of two
cannon-shots from the bay. A ship had come. Three times one Russian
ventured to the shore, and three times was chased back to the woods;
{310} but he had seen enough. The ship was an English trader under
Captain Barber, who finally heard the shouts of the pursued man, put
off a small boat and rescued him. Three others were saved from the
woods in the same way, but had been only a few days on the ship, when
Michael, the Kolosh chief, emboldened by success, rowed out with a
young warrior and asked the English captain to give up the Russians.
Barber affected not to understand, lured both Indians on board, seized
them, put them in irons, and tied them across a cannon mouth, when he
demanded the restoration of all captives and loot; but the Sitkan chief
probably had his own account of who suggested the massacre. Also it
was to the English captain's interests to remain on good terms with the
Indians. Anyway, the twenty captives were not restored till two other
ships had entered port, and sent some Kolosh canoes to bottom with
grape-shot