Beverley with his men took the cover of a fence and some houses sixty yards from the stockade.

Here to their surprise they found themselves below the line of Hamilton's cannon, which, being planted on the second floor of the fort, could not be sufficiently depressed to bear upon them.

A well directed musket fire, however, fell from the loopholes of the blockhouses, the bullets rattling merrily against the cover behind which the attacking forces lay.
Beverley was thinking of Alice during every moment of all this stir and tumult He feared that she might still be a prisoner in the fort exposed to the very bullets that his men were discharging at every crack and cranny of those loosely constructed buildings.

Should he ever see her again?
Would she care for him?
What would be the end of all this terrible suspense?
Those remote forebodings of evils, formless, shadowy, ineffable, which have harried the lover's heart since time began, crowded all pleasant anticipations out of his mind.
Clark, in passing hurriedly from company to company around the line, stopped for a little while when he found Beverley.
"Have you plenty of ammunition ?" was his first inquiry.
"A mighty sight more'n we kin see to shoot with," spoke up Oncle Jazon.
"It's a right smart o' dad burn foolishness to be wastin' it on nothin'; seems like to me 'at we'd better set the dasted fort afire an' smoke the skunks out!" "Speak when you are spoken to, my man," said the Colonel a trifle hotly, and trying by a sharp scrutiny to make him out in the gloom where he crouched.
"Ventrebleu! I'm not askin' YOU, Colonel Clark, nor no other man, when I shill speak.

I talks whenever I gits ready, an' I shoots jes' the same way.