Balancé, La Souffrière. Petit Noël Prière came out of these mountains

In the course of 22 Vendémiaire (14 October), Pétion abandoned the Morne Rouge and went with the 10th and 13th to the Héricourt plantation, intending to make his way toward the West, his own country, and to fight the whites there if he could not come to an understanding with the chiefs of the bands of the interior of the North. He was almost a stranger in that department; he knew the chiefs of the insurgents only from having made war on them; he felt himself entirely isolated; he wished to draw near to Dessalines, who must also have taken up arms in the district of the Artibonite. Suddenly Petit Noël Prière, coming out of the mountains of Balancé and La Souffrière, burst into the Héricourt plantation with all his bands, who were howling frightfully and making ready for battle. Pétion ordered the 10th and 13th, made up of Indigenous men of the West and the South, to form in line of battle. These two corps, which had fled extermination in abandoning the Haut-du-Cap, found themselves face to face with a new enemy whom they had vigorously hunted down for the French. Pétion, at the head of his troops, saw Petit Noël Prière advance to meet him, full of fury and brandishing his saber. “What have you come here to look for?” he asked Pétion. Pétion answered him with dignity: “We have abandoned the cause of the French forever, and we come to ask you for reinforcements.” “We shall give you none; the colonial troops have hunted us horribly; they reach us where the French would never reach us.” “The whites are today our common enemies,” Pétion replied; “assailed by them on one side and by you on the other, we could not hold out; since you refuse us your help, leave us a free passage so that we may return to the West, and do not force us to come to blows with you.” “Might we not believe that you have been sent by the French?” Pétion, who wished to avoid a battle that could only have harmed the cause of liberty, said to him: “Look at this howitzer, look at these two four-pounders; we took them at the Haut-du-Cap. Since you doubt our sentiments, we shall leave at Héricourt our baggage and the women and children who are with us, and we shall march together on the Cap; have General Christophe told of our movements.” At the name of Christophe, Petit Noël Prière brandished his saber in anger and said that Christophe was a brigand whom he meant to kill at the first opportunity.