When the report of the four-pounder, or the ringing of the fort bell, or a volley of musketry sounded the alarm, the women and children hurried to the fortification. Sometimes, while threading the mazes of the forest, the hapless mother and her children would fall into an ambush. Springing from their cover, the prowling savages would ply their tomahawks and scalping knives amid the shrieks of their helpless victims, or bear them away into a captivity more cruel than death. One summer's afternoon, while Mrs. Folsom, with her babe in her arms, was hasting to Fort Stanwig in the Black River Country, New York, after hearing the alarm, she caught sight of a huge Indian lying behind a log, with his rifle leveled apparently directly at her. She quickly sprang to one side and ran through the woods in a course at right angles with the point of danger, expecting every moment to be pierced with a rifle ball. Casting a horror-stricken glance over her shoulder as she ran, she saw her husband hastening on after her, but directly under the Indian's rifle. Shrieking loudly, she pointed to the savage just in time to warn her husband, who stepped behind a tree as the report of the rifle rang through the forest. In an instant he drew a bead upon the lurking foe, who fell with a bullet through his brain. Before the family could reach the fort a legion of savages, roused by the report of the rifles, were on their trail. The mother and child fled swiftly towards their place of refuge, which they succeeded in reaching without harm; but the brave father, while trying to keep the savages at bay, was shot and scalped almost under the walls of the fort. Ann Bush, another of these border heroines, was still more unfortunate than Mrs. Folsom. While she and her husband were fleeing for safety to one of the stations on the Virginia borders, they were overtaken and captured by the Indians, who shot and scalped her husband; and although she soon escaped from captivity, yet in less than twelve months after, while again attempting to find refuge in the same station, she was captured a second time, with an infant in her arms. After traveling a few hours the savages bent down a young hickory, sharpened it, seized the child, scalped it and spitted it upon the tree; they then scalped and tomahawked the mother and left her for dead. She lay insensible for many hours; but it was the will of Providence that she should survive the shock. When she recovered her senses she bandaged her head with her apron, and wonderful to tell, in two days staggered back to the settlement with the dead body of her infant. The transitions of frontier life were often startling and sad. From a wedding to a funeral, from a merrymaking to a massacre, were frequent vicissitudes. One of these shiftings of the scene is described by an actor and eye-witness as follows: