[740] At last the batteries
opened fire. A shell from a coehorn burst prematurely, just as it left
the mouth of the piece, and a fragment striking Prideaux on the head,
killed him instantly. Johnson took command in his place, and made up in
energy what he lacked in skill. In two or three weeks the fort was in
extremity. The rampart was breached, more than a hundred of the garrison
were killed or disabled, and the rest were exhausted with want of sleep.
Pouchot watched anxiously for the promised succors; and on the morning
of the twenty-fourth of July a distant firing told him that they were at
hand.
[Footnote 740: _Rutherford to Haldimand, 14 July, 1759._ Prideaux was
extremely disgusted. _Prideaux to Haldimand, 13 July, 1759_. Allan
Macleane, of the Highlanders, calls the engineers "fools and blockheads,
G--d d--n them." _Macleane to Haldimand, 21 July, 1759._]
Aubry and Ligneris, with their motley following, had left Presquisle a
few days before, to the number, according to Vaudreuil, of eleven
hundred French and two hundred Indians.[741] Among them was a body of
colony troops; but the Frenchmen of the party were chiefly traders and
bushrangers from the West, connecting links between civilization and
savagery; some of them indeed were mere white Indians, imbued with the
ideas and morals of the wigwam, wearing hunting-shirts of smoked
deer-skin embroidered with quills of the Canada porcupine, painting
their faces black and red, tying eagle feathers in their long hair, or
plastering it on their temples with a compound of vermilion and glue.
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