Playfully, as a cat reaches out to cuff its mouse, the army of Iroquois now approached the fort. They gamboled from side to side and uttered screeches. But the loop-holes were yet all manned by men who would not die of fatigue and physical privation, and the fire which sprung from those loop-holes astounded the enemy. Guns of large caliber carried scraps of iron and lead, and mowed like artillery. Three days more, says the chronicle, did this fort by the Long Saut hold out. Who can tell all the story of those days? and who can hear all the story of such endurance? When acclamation cheers a man’s blood and a great cloud of witnesses encompasses him, heroic courage is made easy. But here were a few doomed men in the wilderness, whose fate and whose action might be misrepresented by a surviving foe--silent fighters against odds, thinking, “This anguish and sacrifice of mine are lost on the void, and perhaps taken no account of by any intelligence, except that myself knows it, and myself demands it of me.” This is the courage which brings a man’s soul up above his body like a tall flame out of an altar, and makes us credit the tale of our lineage tracing thus backward: “Which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God.” [Illustration: “Dollard held Claire with his left arm and fought with his sword.”] The fort could not be taken by surprise; it could not be taken by massed sallies. The Iroquois wrangled among themselves. Some were for raising the siege and going back to their own country. Their best braves lay in heaps. But others scouted the eternal disgrace of leaving unpunished so pitiful a foe. Finally they made themselves great shields of split logs, broad as a door, and crept forward under cover of these to hew away the palisades. Mad for revenge, they used their utmost skill and caution. It was at this time that Dollard, among his reeling and praying men--men yet able to smile with powder-blackened faces through the loop-holes--took a large musketoon, filled it with explosives, and plugged it ready to throw among the enemy. His arms had not remaining strength to fling it clear of the palisade’s jagged top. It fell back and exploded in the fort, and amidst the frightful confusion the Iroquois made their first breach, to find it defended; and yet another breach, and yet another, overflowing the inclosure with all their swarms.