Along the trail were the whitewashed cottages of the French farmers, who stared from their windows in their nightcaps, amazed beyond speech at the rashness of the {286} English. On a smaller scale it was a repetition of Braddock's defeat on the Ohio. Indians lay in ambush behind every house, every shrub, in the long grass. They only waited till Dalzell's men had crossed the bridge and were charging the hill at a run. Then the war whoop shrilled both to fore and to rear. The Indians doubled up on their trapped foe from both sides. Rogers' Rangers dashed for hiding in a house. The drum beat retreat. Under cover of Rogers' shots from one side, shots from the boats on the other, Dalzell's men escaped at a panic run back over the trail with a loss of some sixty dead. In September came more ships with more men, again to be ambushed at the narrows, and again to reach Detroit, as the old record says, "bloody as a butcher's shop." So the siege dragged on for more than a year at Detroit. Winter witnessed a slight truce to fighting, for starvation drove the Indians to the hunting field; but May saw Pontiac again encamped under the walls of Detroit till word came from the French on the lower Mississippi in October, definitely and for all, they would not join the Indians. Then Pontiac knew his cause was lost. Up at Michilimackinac similar scenes were enacted. Major Etherington and Captain Leslie had some thirty-five soldiers. There were also hosts of traders outside the walls, among whom was Alexander Henry of Montreal. Word had come of Pontiac at Detroit, but Etherington did not realize that the uprising was general. June 4 was the King's birthday. Shops had been closed. Flags blew above the fort. Gates were wide open. Squaws with heads under shawls sat hunched around the house steps, with that concealed beneath their shawls which the English did not guess. All the men except Henry, who was writing letters, and some Frenchmen, who understood the danger signs, had gone outside the gates to watch a fast and furious game of lacrosse. Again and again the ball came bounding towards the fort gates, only to be whisked to the other end of the field by a deft toss, followed by the swift runners. No one was louder in applause than Etherington. The officers were completely off guard. Suddenly the crowds swayed, gave way, opened; . . . {287} and down the field towards the fort gates surged the players. A dexterous pitch! The ball was inside the fort. After it dashed the Indians. In a flash weapons were grasped from the shawls of the squaws. Musket and knife did the rest. When Henry heard the war whoop and looked from a window he saw Indian warriors bending to drink the blood of hearts that were yet warm. For two days Henry lived in the rubbish heap of the attic in the house of Langlade, a pioneer of Wisconsin. Of the whites at Michilimackinac only twenty escaped death, and they were carried prisoners to the Lower Country for ransom.