It was a winter of great responsibility and danger for Lieutenant Lion Gardiner, and all his courage and good sense were needed to carry him safely through it. Once he was himself wounded by Indian arrows and nearly lost his life. On the 22d of February, he "went out with ten men and three dogs, half a mile from the house, to burn the weeds, leaves, and reeds upon the neck of land" behind the fort, when, suddenly, four Indians "started up out of the fiery reeds," and the sentinels he had set to watch called to him that a great many more were coming from "the other side of the marsh." The Indians attacked his party, killed three or four men, and tried to get between the rest and the fort and cut off their return. "They kept us in a half-moon," says Gardiner, "we retreating and exchanging many a shot... defending ourselves with our naked swords, or else they had taken us all alive.... I was shot with many arrows, but my buff coat preserved me, only one hurt me." The English soldiers of those days wore back and breast pieces of steel over their buff coats. A few days later, the Indians, believing Gardiner dead, came again and surrounded the fort, and, as the old record says, "made many proud challenges and dared the English out to fight," but Gardiner ordered the "two great guns" set off once more, and the Indians disappeared. Finding the fort at Saybrook so well defended, the Pequots fell upon the settlement at Wethersfield, killed a number of men working in the fields, and carried off two young girls. Flushed with this success, they paddled down the river in their canoes and when they passed the Saybrook fort they set up poles, like masts, in the canoes and, by way of bravado, hung upon them the clothes of the Englishmen whom they had murdered. The men in the fort fired on the canoes, but the distance was too great. One shot just grazed the bow of the boat in which were the two young English girls. The Indians passed safely and carried their captives with them to the Pequot country. The Connecticut men now determined to put a stop to the depredations of the Pequots. It was a serious undertaking, for there were only about two hundred and fifty Englishmen in all Connecticut at this time, and there were several hundred Pequot warriors. Help was asked from the colonies in Massachusetts, and, meanwhile, about ninety men were collected from the three settlements of Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor and sent down to Saybrook under the command of Captain John Mason. A number of friendly Indians also went with them, and chief among these was Uncas, sachem of the Mohegans.