The most formidable part of the army consisted of the two cannon in charge of Major Carfrae of the militia artillery. At St. Eustache the French had thought “Le bon Dieu est toujours pour les gros bataillons;” here, also, the God of battles, to whose care “the bold diocesan” commended them, was on the side of those who had most artillery. The day before, a party of rebels on warfare bent had encountered a stranded load of firewood, which imagination and the uncertain light turned into a gun loaded to the muzzle with grape or canister. The sight of it caused them to skip fences, like squirrels, to right and left, a dispersion which no effort of their officers could withstand. Now the real thing began to play, and the woods rang to its reverberations. The fringe of pine trees on the western side of the road suffered if nothing else did; huge splinters were torn from them and hurled here and there, as destructive as any missile. The hidden men were protected by bushes and brush heaps, but the rushing of balls and crashing of trees made enough uproar to cause death by fright. The cannon were then moved farther up the roadway, their muzzles directed to the inn; two round shot, and like bees from a hive the rebels came pouring out, “flying in all directions into the deep, welcome recesses of the forest.” Their prisoners, until then kept in the inn, fortunately had been conducted out by the back door some moments before and given their liberty. It now became a question to preserve their own. The right wing of the loyalist force, under command of Colonel S. P. Jarvis, had meanwhile been moving by by-ways and fields half a mile eastward, the left, under Colonel Chisholm, Judge McLean and Colonel O’Hara, moving westward to converge at Montgomery’s.