Answer was made accordingly, but Niverville’s promise to storm the fort and “run over it” was not kept. Stevens says that his enemies had not the courage to do this, or even to bring up their “fortification,” meaning their fire-wagon with its shield of planks. In fact, an open assault upon a fortified place was a thing unknown in this border warfare, whether waged by Indians alone, or by French and Indians 227 together. The assailants only raised the war-whoop again, and fired, as before, from behind stumps, logs, and bushes. This amusement they kept up from two o’clock till night, when they grew bolder, approached nearer, and shot flights of fire-arrows into the fort, which, water being abundant, were harmless as their bullets. At daylight they gave over this exercise, called out, “Good morning!” to the garrison, and asked for a suspension of arms for two hours. This being agreed to, another flag of truce presently appeared, carried by two Indians, who planted it in the ground within a stone’s throw of the fort, and asked that two men should be sent out to confer with them. This was done, and the men soon came back with a proposal that Stevens should sell provisions to his besiegers, under a promise on their part that they would give him no farther trouble. He answered that he would not sell them provisions for money, but would exchange them for prisoners, and give five bushels of Indian corn for every hostage placed in his hands as security for the release of an English captive in Canada. To this their only answer was firing a few shots against the fort, after which they all disappeared, and were seen no more. The garrison had scarcely eaten or slept for three days. “I believe men were never known to hold out with better resolution,” writes Stevens; and “though there were some thousands of guns shot at us, we had but two men slightly wounded, 228 John Brown and Joseph Ely.”[242] Niverville and his party, disappointed and hungry, now made a tour among the scattered farms and hamlets of the country below, which, incapable of resisting such an inroad, were abandoned at their approach. Thus they took an easy revenge for their rebuff at Number Four, and in a march of thirty or forty leagues, burned five small deserted forts or stockaded houses, “three meeting-houses, several fine barns, about one hundred dwellings, mostly of two stories, furnished even to chests of drawers, and killed five to six hundred sheep and hogs, and about thirty horned cattle. This devastation is well worth a few prisoners or scalps.”[243] It is curious to find such exploits mentioned with complacency, as evidence of prowess.