"Stand to your muskets, you Minute Boys!" Sergeant Corney shouted, and the sound of his voice stiffened my courage wonderfully. "Now is the time to pay back some of our old scores, and every bullet should cut short a life from among those who would harry us of the valley." He had hardly more than ceased speaking when a great uproar could be heard from the distance, and, without turning my head, I understood that the British regulars and the Johnson Greens were pressing the attack on the west and the front, in order to hold our men at the walls that we might not be able to regain possession of the stockade. Now the fight was on in good earnest, and a bloodier one or a more desperate struggle I hope never to see again. After the single cannon which Colonel Gansevoort had caused to be brought in was discharged, the reinforcements betook themselves to their muskets, for our frontiersmen were more accustomed to the use of small arms than big guns, and the tide surged this way and that, with the fate of the fort trembling more than once in the balance, until I had before my eyes only great billows of feathered forms, which rose and fell, advanced and were forced back, until I was well-nigh bewildered. Before this portion of the fighting had come to an end, fully half the garrison was engaged in repelling the attack of Thayendanega's forces, and during such time the white portion of the enemy's army might have made a successful assault upon the walls, I verily believe, but for the cowardice displayed by the Tories. How long we struggled there hand to hand, stumbling now over the lifeless forms of our comrades, and again finding our way checked by the dead bodies of the savages, I cannot say; but certain it is that we finally drove the last of the hated foe over the stockade, and gave Thayendanega's boasting braves such a lesson as they would not need to have repeated for many days. I was not less wearied with the carnage than those around me. Even Sergeant Corney, to whom such scenes were not strange, leaned against a portion of the earthworks as if for support while he dashed the perspiration from his eyes, and then we knew by the sounds that the battle was being waged severely over against the sally-port. Then it was I called for the Minute Boys to follow me, as I ran at the best pace possible in that direction, for there was our post of duty. Now Colonel Gansevoort no longer husbanded his store of ammunition intended for the cannon, and every piece in the northern and eastern bastions was being worked with the utmost rapidity, sending among the Tories such a shower of iron as their cowardly hearts could not hold out against, and, when they turned with cries of fear to flee, the British regulars, understanding that they were too few in number to effect anything against us, joined in the retreat.