, shivering in the snow, till starlight
fades to the gray darkness that precedes dawn. Then the bushrovers
rise, and at moccasin pace, noiseless as tigers, skim across the snow,
over the drifts, over the tops of the palisades, and have dropped into
the town before a soul has awakened. There is no need to tell the
rest. It was not war. It was butchery. Children were torn from their
mother's breast to be brained on the hearthstone. Women were hacked to
pieces. Houses were set on fire, and before the sun had risen
thirty-eight persons had been slaughtered, and the French rovers were
back on the forest trail, homeward bound with one hundred and six
prisoners. Old and young, women of frail health and children barely
able to toddle, were hurried along the trail at bayonet point. Those
whose strength was unequal to the pace were summarily knocked on the
head as they fagged, or failed to ford the ice streams. Twenty-four
perished by the way. Of the one hundred and six prisoners scattered as
captives among the Indians, not half were ever heard of again. The
others were either bought from the Indians by Quebec people, whose pity
was touched, or placed round in the convents to be converted to the
Catholic faith. These were ultimately redeemed by the government of
Massachusetts.

New England's fury over such a raid in time of peace knew no bounds.
Yet how were the English to retaliate? To pursue an ambushed Indian
along a forest trail was to follow a vanishing phantom.

From earliest times Boston had kept up trade with Port Royal, and of
late years Port Royal had been infested with French pirates, who raided
Boston shipping. Colonel Ben {195} Church of Long Island, a noted
bushfighter, of gunpowder temper and form so stout that his men had
always to hoist him over logs in their forest marches, went storming
from New York to Boston with a plan to be revenged by raiding Acadia.

Rouville's bushrovers had burned Deerfield the first of March. By May,
Church had sailed from Boston with six hundred men on two frigates and
half a hundred whaleboats, on vengeance bent. First he stopped at
Baron St. Castin's fort in Maine. St. Castin it was who led the
Indians against the English of Maine. The baron was absent, but his
daughter was captured, with all the servants, and the fort was burned
to the ground. Then up Fundy Bay sailed Church, pausing at
Passamaquoddy to knock four Frenchmen on the head; pausing at Port
Royal