Another ally appeared at the camp.  This was a personage long known in Western fireside story as Captain Jack, the Black Hunter, or the Black Rifle.  It was said of him that, having been a settler on the farthest frontier, in the Valley of the Juniata, he returned one evening to his cabin and found it burned to the ground by Indians, and the bodies of his wife and children lying among the ruins.  He vowed undying vengeance, raised a band of kindred spirits, dressed and painted like Indians, and became the scourge of the red man and the champion of the white.  But he and his wild crew, useful as they might have been, shocked Braddock’s sense of military fitness; and he received them so coldly that they left him.[213]

[Footnote 213:  See several traditional accounts and contemporary letters in Hazard’s Pennsylvania Register, IV. 389, 390, 416; V. 191.]

It was the tenth of June before the army was well on its march.  Three hundred axemen led the way, to cut and clear the road; and the long train of packhorses, wagons, and cannon toiled on behind, over the stumps, roots, and stones of the narrow track, the regulars and provincials marching in the forest close on either side.  Squads of men were thrown out on the flanks, and scouts ranged the woods to guard against surprise; for, with all his scorn of Indians and Canadians, Braddock did not neglect reasonable precautions.  Thus, foot by foot, they advanced into the waste of lonely mountains that divided the streams flowing to the Atlantic from those flowing to the Gulf of Mexico,—­a realm of forests ancient as the world.  The road was but twelve feet wide, and the line of march often extended four miles.  It was like a thin, long party-colored snake, red, blue, and brown, trailing slowly through the depth of leaves, creeping round inaccessible heights, crawling over ridges, moving always in dampness and shadow, by rivulets and waterfalls, crags and chasms, gorges and shaggy steps.  In glimpses only, through jagged boughs and flickering leaves, did this wild primeval world reveal itself, with its dark green mountains, flecked with the morning mist, and its distant summits pencilled in dreamy blue.  The army passed the main Alleghany, Meadow Mountain, and Great Savage Mountain, and traversed the funereal pine-forest afterwards called the Shades of Death.  No attempt was made to interrupt their march, though the commandant of Fort Duquesne had sent out parties for that purpose.  A few French and Indians hovered about them, now and then scalping a straggler or inscribing filthy insults on trees; while others fell upon the border settlements which the advance of the troops had left defenceless.  Here they were more successful, butchering about thirty persons, chiefly women and children.