Henry paused. He had calculated his effects carefully. He wished to create feeling between red man and renegade, and he wished to plant in the red mind the belief that he was really protected by Manitou. The tribes, at least, might hesitate and delay, and meanwhile the fleet was coming. "I'll see that you're burned at the stake when we take this place," shouted Girty, "and I'll see that it's the slowest fire a man ever died over." "I've said what I had to say," called back the youth. He stepped down from the wall. The renegades and the chiefs retired to the woods. "What were you saying to them?" asked Major Braithwaite. "I was telling them of their former failures," replied Henry. "I was trying to discourage them and to make them hate the renegades." CHAPTER XIV SIX FIGURES IN THE DUSK The hours moved slowly, and Henry began to believe that his grandiloquent speech--purposely so--had met with some success. No attack was made, and delay was what he wanted. The woods seemed to remain the home of peace and quiet. Major Braithwaite had a pair of strong military glasses, and, as an additional precaution, he and Henry searched the woods with them from the upper windows of the blockhouse. Still there was no evidence of Indian attack, and Henry turned the glasses upon the river. He could now make out definitely the canoes, half hidden under the foliage on the far bank, but no stir was there. All things seemed to be waiting. Henry turned the glasses down the river. He had a long view, but he saw only the Ohio and its yellow ripples. He lowered the glasses with an impatient little movement and handed them back to their owner. "Why are you disappointed?" asked Major Braithwaite. "I was hoping that the fleet might be coming, which would be a vast help to you here, but I see no sign of its approach. Of course it's slow work for rowers and oarsmen to come week after week against a strong current, and they have been delayed, too, by storms." The news, confined hitherto to a few, spread through the fort, that a fleet might come soon to their help, and there was a wonderful revival of spirits. People were continually climbing to the cupola of the blockhouse, and the Major's glasses were in unbroken use. Always they were pointed down the stream, and women's eyes as well as men's looked anxiously for a boat, a boat bearing white men, the vanguard of the force that would come to save them. The sight of these women so eagerly studying the Ohio moved Henry. He knew, perhaps better than they, that they had the most to fear, and he resolved never to desert them.