and raise the siege in the face of St. Leger's regulars and
Walter Butler's Rangers.

Their combat with Johnson's Greens and Brant's Mohawks had been fought;
and, though masters of the field, they could do no more than hold their
ground. Perhaps the bitter knowledge that they must leave Stanwix to its
fate, and that, too, through their own disobedience, made the better
soldiers of them in time. But it was a hard and dreadful lesson; and I
saw men crying, faces hidden in their powder-blackened hands, as the
dying General was borne through the ranks, lying gray and motionless on
his hemlock litter.

And this is all that I myself witnessed of that shameful ambuscade and
murderous combat, fought some two miles north of the dirty camp, and now
known as the Battle of Oriskany.

That night we buried our dead; one hundred on the field where they had
fallen, two hundred and fifty in the burial trenches at
Oriskany--thirty-five wagon-loads in all. Scarcely an officer of rank
remained to lead the funeral march when the muffled drums of the
Palatines rolled at midnight, and the smoky torches moved, and the
dead-wagons rumbled on through the suffocating darkness of a starless
night. We had few wounded; we took no prisoners; Oriskany meant death.
We counted only thirty men disabled and some score missing.

"God grant the missing be safely dead," prayed our camp chaplain at the
burial trench. We knew what that meant; worse than dead were the
wretched men who had fallen alive into the hands of old John Butler and
his son, Walter, and that vicious drunkard, Barry St. Leger, who had
offered, over his own signature, two hundred and forty dollars a dozen
for prime Tryon County scalps.

I slept little that night, partly from the excitement of my first
serious combat, partly because of the terrible heat. Our outposts, now
painfully overzealous and alert, fired off their muskets at every
fancied sound or movement, and these continual alarms kept me awake,
though Mount and Murphy slept peacefully, and Elerson yawned on guard.

Towards sunrise rain fell heavily, but brought no relief from the heat;
the sun, a cherry-red ball, hung a hand's-breadth over the forests when
the curtain of rain faded away. The riflemen, curled up in the hay on
the barn floor, snored on, unconscious; the batt-horses crunched and
munched in the manger; flies whirled and swarmed over a wheelbarrow
piled full of dead soldier's shoes, which must to-day be distribut