The day passed and no word came to the anxious men in their trenches in the meadows. Another night, silent and cheerless, came over the mountains upon the valley, and with the night came rain. Fresh fears of strategy and surprise must have arisen as the cheerless sun went down. Suddenly, at eight in the evening, a runner brought word that the French were run to cover! Half-King, while coming to join Washington, had found la Force’s party in “a low, obscure place.” It was now time for a daring man to show himself. Such was the young commander at Great Meadows. “That very moment,” wrote Washington in his _Journal_, “I sent out forty men and ordered my ammunition to be put in a place of safety, fearing it to be a stratagem of the French to attack our camp; I left a guard to defend it, and with the rest of my men set out in a heavy rain, and in a night as dark as pitch.” Perhaps a war was never precipitated under stranger circumstances. Contrecoeur, commanding at Fort Duquesne, was made aware by his Indian scouts of Washington’s progress all the way from the Potomac. The day before Washington arrived at Great Meadows Contrecoeur ordered M. de Jumonville to leave Fort Duquesne with a detachment of thirty-four men, commanded by la Force, and go toward the advancing English. To the English (when he met them) he was to explain he had come to order them to retire. To the Indians he was to pretend he was “travelling about to see what is transacting in the King’s Territories, and to take notice of the different roads.” In the eyes of the English the party was to be an embassy. In the eyes of the Indians, a party of scouts reconnoitering. This is clear from the orders given by Contrecoeur to Jumonville. Three days before, on the 26th, this “embassy” was at Gist’s plantation where, according to Gist’s report to Washington, they “would have killed a cow and broken everything in the house, if two _Indians_, whom he (Gist) had left in charge of the home, had not prevented them.” From Gist’s la Force had advanced within five miles of Great Meadows, as Gist ascertained by their tracks on the Indian trail. Then--although the English commander was within an hour’s march--the French retraced their steps to the summit of Laurel Hill and, descending deep into the obscure valley on the east, built a hut under the lea of the precipice and rested from their labors. Here they remained throughout the 27th, while Washington’s scouts were running their legs off in the attempt to locate them and the young Lieutenant-colonel was in a fever of anxiety at their sudden, ominous disappearance. Now they were found.