The summer sun had never shown more kindly over the lovely valley.
The time was now three o'clock.

The gates of the fort were thrown open, and the little army marched out, only three hundred, of whom seventy were old men, or boys so young that in our day they would be called children.

Yet they marched bravely against the picked warriors of the Iroquois, trained from infancy to the forest and war, and a formidable body of white rovers who wished to destroy the little colony of "rebels," as they called them.
Small though it might be, it was a gallant army.

Young and old held their heads high.

A banner was flying, and a boy beat a steady insistent roll upon a drum.