The windows of my upper room were open, and along with the streaming sunlight came snatches of echoing words from the street below. Men had gone across the river, and horses were to be posted farther on upon the Berkshire turnpike, to catch the earliest whisper from across the mountains of how the fight had gone. No one talked of anything else. Assuredly I too would have been on the street outside, eager to learn and discuss the news from Boston, but that my old friend Major Jelles Fonda had come down from Caughnawaga, bearing to me almost as grave intelligence from the Mohawk Valley. How well I remember him still, the good, square-set, solid merchant-soldier, with his bold broad face, resolute mouth, and calm, resourceful, masterful air! He sat in his woollen shirt-sleeves, for the day was hot, and slowly unfolded to me his story between meditative and deliberate whiffs of his pipe. I listened with growing interest, until at last I forgot to keep even one ear upon the sounds from the street, which before had so absorbed me. He had much to tell. More than a month before, the two contending factions had come to fisticuffs, during a meeting held by the Whigs in and in front of John Veeder's house, at Caughnawaga. They were to raise a liberty pole there, and the crowd must have numbered two hundred or more. While they were deliberating, up rides Guy Johnson, his short, pursy figure waddling in the saddle, his arrogant, high-featured face redder than ever with rage. Back of him rode a whole company of the Hall cabal--Sir John Johnson, Philip Cross, the Butlers, and so on--all resolved upon breaking up the meeting, and supported by a host of servants and dependents, well armed. Many of these were drunk. Colonel Guy pushed his horse into the crowd, and began a violent harangue, imputing the basest motives to those who had summoned them thither. Young Jake Sammons, with the characteristic boldness of his family, stood up to the Indian superintendent and answered him as he deserved, whereat some half-dozen of the Johnson men fell upon Jake, knocked him down, and pummelled him sorely. Some insisted that it was peppery Guy himself who felled the youngster with his loaded riding-whip, but on this point Major Jelles was not clear. "But what were our people about, to let this happen?" I asked, with some heat. "To tell the truth," he answered, regretfully, "they mostly walked away. Only a few of us held our place. Our men were unarmed, for one thing. Moreover, they are in awe of the power of the Hall. The magistrates, the sheriff, the constables, the assessors--everybody, in fact, who has office in Tryon County--take orders from the Hall. You can't get people to forget that. Besides, if they had resisted, they would have been shot down."