mac and he is
safe. Then as to the limits of service, they might just as easily have
been enlisted for seventeen months as seven.

Then as to punishments: death, it was true, had been decreed for
mutiny and desertion; but there was no punishment for cowardice; for
holding correspondence with the enemy; for quitting, or sleeping on
one's post; all capital offences, according to the military codes of
Europe. Neither were there provisions for quartering or billeting
soldiers, or impressing wagons and other conveyances, in times of
exigency. To crown all, no court-martial could sit out of Virginia; a
most embarrassing regulation, when troops were fifty or a hundred
miles beyond the frontier. He earnestly suggested amendments on all
these points, as well as with regard to the soldiers' pay; which was
less than that of the regular troops, or the troops of most of the
other provinces.

All these suggestions, showing at this youthful age that forethought
and circumspection which distinguished him throughout life, were
repeatedly and eloquently urged upon Governor Dinwiddie, with very
little effect. The plan of a frontier line of twenty-three forts was
persisted in. Fort Cumberland was pertinaciously kept up at a great
and useless expense of men and money, and the militia laws remained
lax and inefficient. It was decreed, however, that the great central
fort at Winchester, recommended by Washington, should be erected.

In the height of the alarm a company of one hundred gentlemen, mounted
and equipped, volunteered their services to repair to the frontier.
They were headed by Peyton Randolph. No doubt they would have
conducted themselves gallantly had they been put to the test; but
before they arrived near the scene of danger the alarm was over. About
the beginning of May, scouts brought in word that the tracks of the
marauding savages tended toward Fort Duquesne, as if on the return. In
a little while it was ascertained that they had recrossed the
Alleghany Mountain to the Ohio in such numbers as to leave a beaten
track, equal to that made in the preceding year by the army of
Braddock.

The repeated inroads of the savages called for an effectual and
permanent check. The idea of being constantly subject to the
irruptions of a deadly foe, that moved with stealth and mystery, and
was only to be traced by its ravages and counted by its footprints,
discouraged all settlement of the country. The beautiful valley of the
Shenandoa