The battle went on. If it was to be fight or fall, the brave frontiersmen decided it should be fight. Great confusion reigned at first, but courage soon returned, and though men fell in numbers, the survivors stood their ground like veterans. For nearly an hour the fierce affray continued. The enemy surrounded the provincials on all sides, and were pressing step by step closer. The whole force might have been slain or captured, but for a wise suggestion of one of their number and an admirable change in their line of battle. Each small group was formed into a circle, and thus they met the enemy at all points. This greatly increased their defensive powers. So destructive now became their fire that the British soldiers rushed upon them in rage, seeking to break their line by a bayonet charge. They were boldly met, and a hand-to-hand death-struggle began. At this moment a heavy thunder-peal broke from the darkening skies. Down poured the rain in drenching showers. Lightning filled the air. Crash after crash of thunder rolled through the sky. Checked in their blood-thirst by the fury of the elements, the combatants hastily separated and ran for the shelter of the trees, vanquished by water where fire had failed to overcome their rage. The affair so far had not been unlike that of Braddock's defeat, some twenty years before. But these were American militia, not British regulars, frontiersmen who knew too much of Indian fighting to stand in their ranks and be shot down. They had long since taken to the trees, and fought the savages in their own way. To this, perhaps, may be ascribed the difference in result from that of the Braddock fight. After the rain, the patriots gained better ground and adopted new and useful tactics. Before, when the Indians noticed a shot from behind a tree, they would rush forward and tomahawk the unlucky provincial before he could reload. But now two men were placed behind each tree, so that when the whooping savage sprang forward with his tomahawk a second bullet was ready to welcome him. The fire from the American side now grew so destructive that the Indians began to give way. A body of Johnson's Greens came up to their support. These were mostly loyalist refugees from the Mohawk Valley, to whom the patriot militia bore the bitterest enmity. Recognizing them, the maddened provincials leaped upon them with tiger-like rage, and a hand-to-hand contest began, in which knives and bayonets took the place of bullets, and the contest grew brutally ferocious.