After their departure on the night of August 14 Hull learned that Brock had reached Malden the night before with heavy reinforcements. According to Hull’s later story, he immediately sent orders to McArthur and Cass to return to Detroit, giving the reasons for doing so;[274] in fact he did not send till the afternoon of the next day,[275] and the orders reached the detachment four-and-twenty miles distant only at sunset August 15. So it happened that on the early morning of August 16 Hull was guarding the fort and town of Detroit with about two hundred and fifty effective men of the Fourth Regiment, about seven hundred men of the Ohio militia, and such of the Michigan militia and Ohio volunteers as may have been present,--all told, about a thousand effectives. Hull estimated his force as not exceeding eight hundred men;[276] Major Jesup, the acting adjutant-general, reported it as one thousand and sixty, including the Michigan militia.[277] If the sickness and loss of strength at Detroit were in proportion to the waste that soon afterward astonished the generals at Niagara, Hull’s estimate was perhaps near the truth. Meanwhile Brock acted with rapidity and decision. After reaching Malden late at night August 13, he held a council the next day, said to have been attended by a thousand Indian warriors.[278] “Among the Indians whom I found at Amherstburg,” he reported to Lord Liverpool,[279] “and who had arrived from distant parts of the country, I found some extraordinary characters. He who attracted most my attention was a Shawnee chief, Tecumset, brother to the Prophet, who for the last two years has carried on contrary to our remonstrances an active warfare against the United States. A more sagacious or more gallant warrior does not, I believe, exist. He was the admiration of every one who conversed with him.” Brock consumed one day in making his arrangements with them, and decided to move his army immediately across the Detroit River and throw it against the fort. “Some say that nothing could be more desperate than the measure,”[280] he wrote soon afterward; “but I answer that the state of the province admits only of desperate remedies. I got possession of the letters my antagonist addressed to the Secretary of War, and also the sentiments which hundreds of his army uttered to their friends. Confidence in their general was gone, and evident despondency prevailed throughout. I crossed the river contrary to the opinion of Colonel Proctor, etc. It is therefore no wonder that envy should attribute to good fortune what, in justice to my own discernment, I must say proceeded from a cool calculation of the _pours_ and _contres_.”