Up to this point the Indians had been content to curiously watch the
proceedings of these interlopers, but finding that they were
establishing themselves permanently, they held a council and resolved
that they should die, partly in atonement for the outrage done to the
red men some two years before by Hunt the kidnapper, and partly from
some vague fear lest the strangers with their superior knowledge and
appliances should conquer and injure the proper owners of the soil.

Not choosing to assault them openly, for the men were brave, alert, and
well armed, the Indians laid in wait around the spring where they must
daily go for water, watched them as they went afield in pursuit of game,
in fact harassed them at every turn, until of the eleven but three were
left alive, and they, so broken in strength, courage, and hope, that
they were easily captured and reduced to slavery. One remained here at
Nauset, and the other two were sent, one to the Massachusetts, the other
to the Namasket tribes, where they were kept as the mock and victims of
the brutal sport of the savages. The one who remained at Nauset was the
best looking, and evidently the most attractive of the three, and from
Squanto's description seemed to have been an officer, and a very
attractive young man. The-White-Birch, sister of Aspinet, chief of the
Nausets, having fixed her regards upon the prisoner, discovered these
peculiarities, and one day when the boys of the village were amusing
themselves with seeing how near they could shoot their blunted arrows to
the prisoner's eyes without putting them out, she stepped forward, and,
Pocahontas-like, announced that she took this man for her husband, and
as such claimed his release from torture. Her demand was complied with,
and the half dead victim unbound and informed of his new honors; but it
was too late--want, misery, and cruelty had done their work, and the
poor fellow's wits had fled. He accepted the tender care and affection
of The-White-Birch as a child might have done, but the joyous gallantry
of the debonair young French officer was a thing of the past, and the
bridegroom had become as completely the child of nature as his bride. He
was adopted into the tribe, and the Indian name given him, in no spirit
of taunt or contempt, but simply as a descriptive appellation, meant
The-White-Fool.

They were married, these two strange lovers, and lived in the cabin
built of ship's planks by The-White-Fool's dead comrad