There was only one thing to be done; they must reach the open spaces round the town out of reach of these marksmen hidden behind the trees. They quickened their pace, urged on by the cries of the wounded and groans of the dying. Luckily, in the uncertain light the marksmanship had not been very good, or I do not know how anyone could have escaped. Then, just as they reached Old Town there was another shot, and Colonel Sandford fell. He was dead. And the wildest panic ensued. At least this is what Dallas says. There was but one thought uppermost in their minds--to get away. Undoubtedly they could have held the town had there been anyone whom they trusted to lead them, and undoubtedly they made no such effort. There was no one whose orders they would obey. The darkness gave them just the help they needed. In the murk and pouring rain they squelched their way down the slippery mountain paths, sure that dragoons were totally unfitted for mountain warfare, and so overjoyed at their escape from a handful of savages that they fired off their muskets, made a tremendous row, and generally misbehaved themselves. It is all very well to think scorn of them now, but the densely-wooded mountains were terrible, they had seen their leader fall and they were certainly both by training and equipment totally unfitted to cope with savages on the warpath. That night there was a riotous scene. Lord Balcarres, we are told, having slipped on a plank made slippery by the rain had “a contusion over the eye,” if he hadn't been a lord and the Governor it would have been a black eye, and it might well have been attributed to another cause. But it did not add to his beauty, and the soldiers rushing into the camp wild with delight at having escaped, made such an uproar that only the Governor could cope with it. The night, indeed, was disgraceful to both sides, for the Maroons, instead of following up their very great success, retired to their town and recruited their spirits with such copious draughts of rum as made them “frantic and desperate.” Sixty of them by their own account lay in a state of insensibility till two o'clock the next day, when with the assistance of the women and the less intoxicated men they were removed to the cockpits of Petit River. Had the troops gone up that morning, more than a fourth of the young Maroon men must have fallen into their hands.