Here, when all were over, a short halt was ordered for
rest and refreshment.
[Footnote 221: Compare the account of another eye-witness, Dr. Walker,
in _Hazard's Pennsylvania Register_, VI. 104.]
Why had not Beaujeu defended the ford? This was his intention in the
morning; but he had been met by obstacles, the nature of which is not
wholly clear. His Indians, it seems, had proved refractory. Three
hundred of them left him, went off in another direction, and did not
rejoin him till the English had crossed the river.[222] Hence perhaps it
was that, having left Fort Duquesne at eight o'clock, he spent half the
day in marching seven miles, and was more than a mile from the
fording-place when the British reached the eastern shore. The delay,
from whatever cause arising, cost him the opportunity of laying an
ambush either at the ford or in the gullies and ravines that channelled
the forest through which Braddock was now on the point of marching.
[Footnote 222: _Relation de Godefroy_, in Shea, _Bataille du
Malangueule_.]
Not far from the bank of the river, and close by the British line of
march, there was a clearing and a deserted house that had once belonged
to the trader Fraser. Washington remembered it well. It was here that he
found rest and shelter on the winter journey homeward from his mission
to Fort Le Boeuf. He was in no less need of rest at this moment; for
recent fever had so weakened him that he could hardly sit his horse.
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