All through the night of July 6th we rowed our clumsy bateaux up the narrowing waters of Wood Creek, lighted on our way by the red glow spread fan-like over the sky behind us; and when we reached Fort Ann, we found Colonel Long ahead of us. I had cursed him for his shortsightedness on the retreat from Ticonderoga, but I blessed him now. It sickens me to think what might have happened, except for Colonel Long, to those hundreds of ill and wounded men and to those other hundreds of women on that stifling July night if they had gone blundering through swamps and deep woods, half blind with unreasoning apprehension. But Long stood on the bank of the creek with his little Irish servant, Mullen, holding a lantern to his face so that the frightened fugitives could see him as well as hear him. He talked to the women and the sick, as they scrambled ashore, cheering them up and urging them forward. “Just keep right on,” he said, his voice hoarse from repeating it. “Keep straight on to Fort Edward. Take your time. Nothing’s going to hurt you. We’ll hold the British back. They’ll never get by us. Keep right on to Fort Edward. We’ll fight ’em off!” He was a brave man and a good officer. In spite of having a regiment whose enlistment was on the verge of expiring—a regiment which did, presently, march off to New Hampshire, regardless of Colonel Long’s pleading and our own desperate need of troops—in spite of that he held his men there at Fort Ann and two days later fought back the British in an action that was small, but that was as sharp and deadly as any action of the war.

So we came safely over the morasses and the countless log bridges of the Fort Edward road, dragging the sick, pulling the women from the mud-holes into which they slipped, fighting the gnats and mosquitoes that droned eternally with us through the steamy breathlessness of those dark swamps, hovering in misty clouds about our heads. All through the 7th of July our ragged, mud-stained companions, remnants of the Ticonderoga garrison, straggled dog-tired from the forest and advanced across the fertile shelf of fields above the broad Hudson toward the shelter of Fort Edward.