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160 after the retreating redcoats and their "buckskin colonel." Little is known of the story of this day within the earthen triangle, save as it is told in the meager details of the general battle. There was great lack of food, but, to compensate for this, as the soldiers no doubt thought, there was much to drink. By eleven o'clock the French and Indians, spreading throughout the forests on the northwest, began firing at six hundred yards' distance. Finally they circled to the southeast where the forests approached nearer to the English trenches. Washington at once drew his little army out of the fort and boldly challenged assault on the narrow neck of solid land on the south which formed the only approach to the fort.

But the crafty Villiers, not to be tempted, kept well within the forest shadows to the south and east—cutting off all retreat to Virginia. Realizing at last that the French would not give battle, Washington withdrew again behind his entrenchments, Mackaye's South Carolinians occupying the rifle-pits which paralleled two sides of the fortification.