For the last three days the command, consisting of some twenty-six hundred men, had been advancing by forced marches, despite the deterrent weather. Setting out on the 7th of June from Fort Prince George, where the army had rested for ten days after the march of three hundred miles from Charlestown, Colonel Grant encountered a season of phenomenal rain-fall. Moreover, the lay of the land,--long stretches of broken, rocky country, gashed by steep ravines and intersected by foaming, swollen torrents, deep and dangerous to ford, encompassed on every hand by rugged heights and narrow, intricate, winding valleys, affording always but a restricted passage,--offered peculiar advantages for attack. Colonel Grant, aware that these craggy defiles could be held against him even by an inferior force, that a smart demonstration on the flank would so separate the thin line of his troops that one division would hardly be available to come to the support of the other, that an engagement here and now would result in great loss of life, if not an actual and decisive repulse, was urging the march forward at the utmost speed possible to reach more practicable ground for an encounter, regardless how the pace might harass the men. But they were responding gallantly to the demands on their strength, and this was what he had hardly dared to hope. For during the previous winter, when General Amherst ordered the British regulars south by sea, many of them immediately upon their arrival in Charlestown, succumbed to an illness occasioned by drinking the brackish water of certain wells of the city. Coming in response to the urgent appeals of the province to the commander-in-chief of the army to defend the frontier against the turbulent Cherokees who ravaged the borders, the British force were looked upon as public deliverers, and the people of the city took the ill soldiers from the camps into their own private dwellings, nursing them until they were quite restored. No troops could have better endured the extreme hardships which they successfully encountered in their march northward. So swift an advance seemed almost impossible. The speed of the movement apparently had not been anticipated, even by that wily and watchful enemy, the Cherokees. It has been said that at this critical juncture the Indians had failed to receive the supply of ammunition from the French which they had anticipated, although a quantity, inadequate for the emergency, however, reached them a few days later. At all events Colonel Grant was nearly free of the district where disaster so menaced him before he received a single shot. He had profited much by his several campaigns in this country since he led that rash, impetuous, and bloody demonstration against Fort Duquesne, in which he himself was captured with nineteen of his officers, and his command was almost cut to pieces. Now his scouts patrolled the woods in every direction. His vanguard of Indian allies under command of a British officer was