A Spectre of Power by Mary Noailles Murfree

THE snow lay deep at Fort Prince George when they returned.[12] The air was now clear of flakes, invested with that strange absolute funereal stillness characteristic of the muffled world, but the sky was still darkly gray and with a menace in its motionless solemnity. The roofs of the block-houses and barracks showed densely white against the slate-colored clouds; not even about the great smoking chimneys was a trace of thaw. The palisades that surmounted the unbroken white walls of the rampart upheld fluffy drifts lodged among the sharp-pointed stakes. The glacis was only such a faint outline as might remain in vague traces of a prehistoric work. The prickly branches of a strong abatis on two sides of the fort thrust out darkly from the overwhelming banks like the protest of a buried forest. The thousand stumps, relics of the encampment of Colonel Grant's army here the preceding year, were utterly submerged, and gave more than one of the approaching party a headlong fall as the two British soldiers, the Choctaw Mingo, and the Muscogee guard, with their prisoner, all half frozen, dead beat, and nearly starved, came within view from the gates. The ditch was half full of ice, solid as a rock, but the heart of the sentry was all aglow to behold them at a distance, and his jubilant call, "Corporal of the guard! " reached them as they struggled across the intervening spaces with the grateful realization that they were not to be kept waiting for identification, while the last resources of endurance gave way at the moment of rescue and the portal of refuge.

A clangor of weapons, keen and clear on the icy air, the tramp of marching feet, the glitter of steel and scarlet cloth, came to them through the great gate, following hard on the cry to turn out the guard. In less than five minutes the red glow of great fires, ardent spirits unsparingly administered, hot food, and the comforts of beds and blankets invested the recollection of the struggle through the snow, the tramp of more than two hundred miles, the dangers and vicissitudes of the journey with a certain unreality, seeming rather something they had wildly dreamed, were it not for the testimony of each to reinforce the memory of the others.