hering up all the people who were in the village, had fled. A
retreating warrior or two had fired the shots, but when the white men
entered this important Iroquois stronghold they did not find a single
human being. Timmendiquas, the White Lightning of the Wyandots, was
gone; Thayendanegea, the real head of the Six Nations, had slipped away;
and with them had vanished the renegades. But they had gone in haste.
All around them were the evidences. The houses, built of wood, were
scores in number, and many of them contained furniture such as a
prosperous white man of the border would buy for himself. There were
gardens and shade trees about these, and back of them, barns, many of
them filled with Indian corn. Farther on were clusters of bark lodges,
which had been inhabited by the less progressive of the Iroquois.

Henry stood in the center of the town and looked at the houses misty
in the moonlight. The army had not yet made much noise, but he was
beginning to hear behind him the ominous word, "Wyoming," repeated more
than once. Cornelius Heemskerk had stopped revolving, and, standing
beside Henry, wiped his perspiring, red face.

"Now that I am here, I think again of the blue plates of Holland,
Mr. Ware," he said. "It is a dark and sanguinary time. The men whose
brethren were scalped or burned alive at Wyoming will not now spare the
town of those who did it. In this wilderness they give blow for blow, or
perish."

Henry knew that it was true, but he felt a certain sadness. His heart
had been inflamed against the Iroquois, he could never forget Wyoming or
its horrors; but in the destruction of an ancient town the long labor
of man perished, and it seemed waste. Doubtless a dozen generations of
Iroquois children had played here on the grass. He walked toward the
northern end of the village, and saw fields there from which recent corn
had been taken, but behind him the cry, "Wyoming!" was repeated louder
and oftener now. Then he saw men running here and there with torches,
and presently smoke and flame burst from the houses. He examined the
fields and forest for a little distance to see if any ambushed foe might
still lie among them, but all the while the flame and smoke behind him
were rising higher.

Henry turned back and joined his comrades. Oghwaga was perishing. The
flames leaped from house to house, and then from lodge to lodge. There
was no need to use torches any more. The whole village was wrapped in
a mass of f