A volley of lighter reports rang out. Cavett stumbled and threw his arms up, thrust forward by a projectile striking his back. He did not rise. Less than two hundred yards beyond Cavett’s body, men were coming out of the woods; some in uniform, others in civilian dress. Among the leading rank were several brown-skinned figures in breech-clouts: Oneida warriors, from their feathered scalp locks.

The cannon roared again, spitting smoke. Wyatt ducked. This time, the ball landed twenty yards short. Scattering sand and stone, it bounced several times before finally rolling to an undignified halt at the end of a long furrow, one hundred yards past its intended target.

The gunboat was listing heavily with half its crew writhing bloodily in the scuppers. Wyatt saw that some wounded survivors were dragging themselves over the side and into the shallows while others, miraculously unscathed by the detonation, were trying to swim away. It had been a devastatingly accurate shot, and judging by the trajectory of the second ball, possibly a lucky one.

He looked to his men. The Rangers had found shelter behind a couple of beached tree trunks whose entwined limbs formed a natural barricade. Weapons primed, they had not opened fire. The range was too great. It would have been a waste of ammunition.

Tewanias and the boy had been less than a hundred paces away when they’d left the woods. Now they too were running, trying to make up the ground, the dog leading the way. Somehow, the boy had retained hold of his horse, which, thrown into panic by the cannonfire, was whinnying in terror. As Wyatt looked on, the animal gave a desperate lunge and broke from the boy’s grip, galloping off along the shore.

There was another boom. The top of the gunboat’s mast and yard crumpled like matchwood. The gunner’s aim was improving.

Wyatt slipped Tewanias’s musket off his shoulder. As the Mohawk and the boy ran in behind the primitive defensive wall, Wyatt tossed Tewanias his weapon, only noticing at the last minute that the Mohawk already had a long gun strapped across his back: a carbine. As Tewanias took the catch, Wyatt saw the wound in the Indian’s side.

“Get behind us, Matthew!” Wyatt urged. “Keep your head down!”

The enemy troops were still beyond rifle range but advancing quickly, using the width of the shoreline, knowing that with the gunboat’s bow-chaser out of action they had little to fear from the handful of men opposing them.

A roar came from the direction of the boat. Wyatt’s first thought was that another powder keg had gone up, but then he saw an eruption of smoke by the starboard gunwale. Somehow, one of the crew had managed to aim and fire the stern-mounted swivel-gun.

A close-quarter weapon devised to repel boarders, when loaded with grapeshot the swivel-gun was a man-killer. Even when fired from a distance it was capable of inflicting appalling damage.