" Parties were sent out to scour the woods, but they
found no enemy. Two days passed; when, on the morning of the
twenty-seventh, Christopher Gist, who had lately made a settlement on
the farther side of Laurel Hill, twelve or thirteen miles distant, came
to the camp with news that fifty Frenchmen had been at his house towards
noon of the day before, and would have destroyed everything but for the
intervention of two Indians whom he had left in charge during his
absence. Washington sent seventy-five men to look for the party; but the
search was vain, the French having hidden themselves so well as to
escape any eye but that of an Indian. In the evening a runner came from
the Half-King, who was encamped with a few warriors some miles distant.
He had sent to tell Washington that he had found the tracks of two men,
and traced them towards a dark glen in the forest, where in his belief
all the French were lurking.
Washington seems not to have hesitated a moment. Fearing a stratagem to
surprise his camp, he left his main force to guard it, and at ten
o'clock set out for the Half-King's wigwams at the head of forty men.
The night was rainy, and the forest, to use his own words, "as black as
pitch." "The path," he continues, "was hardly wide enough for one man;
we often lost it, and could not find it again for fifteen or twenty
minutes, and we often tumbled over each other in the dark[147]." Seven
of his men were lost in the woods and left behind.
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