ous fire was opened upon it from either shore.
The bullets not only came from the level of the water, but from the tops
of the hills, and the sides of the boat offered no protection against
the latter. The men of the fleet returned the fire, but their lead was
sent into the forest and the undergrowth, and they did not know whether
it hit anything except inoffensive wood and earth.

Adam Colfax drew back. He felt that he might have forced the pass, but
the loss in men and stores would be too great. It was not his chief
object to fight battles even if every battle should prove a victory.

When he withdrew, the forest relapsed into silence, but when he
attempted the passage again the next day he was attacked by a similar,
though greater, fire. He was now in a terrible quandary. He did not wish
another such desperate battle as that which he had been forced to fight
on the Lower Mississippi. He might win it, but there would be a great
expenditure of men and ammunition, and at this vast distance from New
Orleans neither could be replaced.

He drew back to a wider part of the river and decided to wait a day or
two, that is, to take counsel of delay.

Adam Colfax was proud of his fleet and the great amount of precious
stores that it carried. The reinforcements after the Battle of the Bayou
had raised it to more than its original strength and value. All the men
had recovered from their wounds, and everybody was in splendid health.
He had made up his mind that fleet and cargo should be delivered intact
at Pittsburgh, otherwise he could never consider his voyage wholly a
success.

The night after he fell back from the watery pass he held a council of
his captains and guides on his own flat boat, which had been named the
_Independence_. He had with him Adolphe Drouillard, a brave and devoted
French Creole from New Orleans; James Tilden, a Virginian; Henry
Eckford, a south Carolinian; Charles Turner, a New Yorker, and William
Truesdale, and Eben Barber, New Englanders, and besides these, Nat
Thrale and Ned Lyon, the best of the scouts and guides since the
disappearance of the five, were present.

The fleet was anchored in the middle of the river, out of rifle shot for
the present, but Adam Colfax knew very well that the enemy was in the
dense wood lining either bank. He had sent skirmishers ashore in the
afternoon, and they did not go many yards from the stream before they
were compelled to exchange shots with the foe. Thrale