CHAPTER XIV

SIX FIGURES IN THE DUSK

The hours moved slowly, and Henry began to believe that his
grandiloquent speech--purposely so--had met with some success. No attack
was made, and delay was what he wanted. The woods seemed to remain the
home of peace and quiet. Major Braithwaite had a pair of strong military
glasses, and, as an additional precaution, he and Henry searched the
woods with them from the upper windows of the blockhouse. Still there
was no evidence of Indian attack, and Henry turned the glasses upon the
river. He could now make out definitely the canoes, half hidden under
the foliage on the far bank, but no stir was there. All things seemed to
be waiting.

Henry turned the glasses down the river. He had a long view, but he saw
only the Ohio and its yellow ripples. He lowered the glasses with an
impatient little movement and handed them back to their owner.

"Why are you disappointed?" asked Major Braithwaite.

"I was hoping that the fleet might be coming, which would be a vast help
to you here, but I see no sign of its approach. Of course it's slow work
for rowers and oarsmen to come week after week against a strong current,
and they have been delayed, too, by storms."

The news, confined hitherto to a few, spread through the fort, that a
fleet might come soon to their help, and there was a wonderful revival
of spirits. People were continually climbing to the cupola of the
blockhouse, and the Major's glasses were in unbroken use. Always they
were pointed down the stream, and women's eyes as well as men's looked
anxiously for a boat, a boat bearing white men, the vanguard of the
force that would come to save them. The sight of these women so eagerly
studying the Ohio moved Henry. He knew, perhaps better than they, that
they had the most to fear, and he resolved never to desert them.

In this interval of quiet Henry went down to the little spring which was
just east of the last row of houses, but a full twenty yards from the
palisade. The ground sank away abruptly there, leaving a little bluff of
stone three or four feet high. The stream, two inches deep and six
inches broad, beautifully clear and almost as cold as ice, flowed from
an opening at the base of the bluff. A round pool, five or six feet
across and two feet deep, had been cut in the stone at the outlet of the
spring, and a gourd lay beside it for the use of all who wished to
drink.

Henry drank from the pool and sat down beside it