The progress of the party was becoming dangerous. They changed their
mode of advance and moved only in the night. All day they lay close in
the depth of the forest, sleeping, lounging, smoking tobacco of their
own raising, and beguiling the hours, no doubt, with the shallow banter
and obscene jesting with which knots of Indians are wont to amuse their
leisure. At twilight they embarked again, paddling their cautious way
till the eastern sky began to redden. Their goal was the rocky
promontory where Fort Ticonderoga was long afterward built. Thence, they
would pass the outlet of Lake George, and launch their canoes again on
that Como of the wilderness, whose waters, limpid as a fountain-head,
stretched far southward between their flanking mountains. Landing at the
future site of Fort William Henry, they would carry their canoes through
the forest to the river Hudson, and, descending it, attack perhaps some
outlying town of the Mohawks. In the next century this chain of lakes
and rivers became the grand highway of savage and civilized war, linked
to memories of momentous conflicts.
The allies were spared so long a progress. On the morning of the
twenty-ninth of July, after paddling all night, they hid as usual in the
forest on the western shore, apparently between Crown Point and
Ticonderoga.
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