Lieutenant Phillips with eighteen men gained the first possession and beat them back. Lieutenant Crafton with fifteen men stopped the French on the left from gaining the other part of the mountain. Two gentlemen volunteers hastened up and supported him with great bravery. The enemy now pushed so closely on the front that the combatants were often not twenty yards apart, and sometimes were mixed together. Lieutenant Phillips, surrounded by three hundred Indians, surrendered under promise of good quarter, but a few minutes later he and his whole party were tied to trees and hacked to death in a most barbarous manner. The savages maddened, it is said, by the sight of a scalp they found in the breast of a man's hunting frock, revenged themselves on their victims by holding up their scalps. The Rangers were now broken and put to flight, each man for himself, while the Indians, closely pursuing, took several prisoners. [Illustration: ROGERS' ROCK] My great-great-grandfather in his modest narrative does not mention his own hairbreadth escape. The Rangers, when put to flight, retreated in the best manner possible. Rogers was singled out by the French; the Indians, closely pursuing, ran him up the steep mountain then known as Bald Mountain, since Rogers Rock, to its face, and there on the brow of the precipice he threw away his knapsack and clothes together with his commission. There was but one chance for his life, and death was preferable to capture and torture by the savages. Slowly the sun is setting over the mountain tops, gilding the lake below, as down the face of the precipitous rock for more than a thousand feet he slides in his snow shoes to the frozen lake below, and there, quickly changing his snow shoes for skates, glides over the vast white desert. Scarcely had he disappeared from sight when the foremost warrior reached the cliff sure of his prey--"No Roger!" There were his tracks! Other warriors came running up to the cliff sure of the prize--Rogers' scalp--for the enemy dreaded him, and with reason--and gazed upon his tracks. Soon a rapidly receding form on the ice below attracted their notice, and the baffled savages, seeing that the famous Ranger had safely effected the perilous descent, gave up the chase fully persuaded that Rogers was under the protection of the Great Spirit. The Indians have a superstition, that the witches or evil spirits haunt this place, and seizing upon the spirits of bad Indians, on their way to the happy hunting grounds, slide down the precipitous cliff with them into the lake where they are drowned. Atalapose is their word for a sliding place. During the one and one-half hours of battle the Rangers lost eight officers and more than one hundred privates killed on the spot. The enemy lost one hundred and fifty killed and some one hundred and fifty wounded, mostly Indians.