enty, which it is safe to
diminish by a half. The French and Indians, approaching rapidly, were
met by a volley which stopped them for the moment; then, throwing down
their packs, they rushed on, and after a sharp skirmish broke through
the ambuscade and continued their retreat. Vaudreuil sets their total
loss at eight killed and eighteen wounded,--the former including two
officers, Vercheres and Chambly. He further declares that in the
skirmish all the English, except ten or twelve, were killed outright;
while the English accounts say that the French and Indians took to the
woods, leaving nine of their number dead on the spot, along with their
medicine chest and all their packs.[79]

Scarcely a hamlet of the Massachusetts and New Hampshire borders escaped
a visit from the nimble enemy. Groton, Lancaster, Exeter, Dover,
Kittery, Casco, Kingston, York, Berwick, Wells, Winter Harbor,
Brookfield, Amesbury, Marlborough, were all more or less infested,
usually by small scalping-parties, hiding in the outskirts, waylaying
stragglers, or shooting men at work in the fields, and disappearing as
soon as their blow was struck. These swift and intangible persecutors
were found a far surer and more effectual means of annoyance than larger
bodies. As all the warriors were converts of the Canadian missions, and
as prisoners were an article of value, cases of torture were not very
common; though now and then, as at Exeter, they would roast some poor
wretch alive, or bite off his fingers and sear the stumps with red-hot
tobacco pipes.

This system of petty, secret, and transient attack put the impoverished
colonies to an immense charge in maintaining a cordon of militia along
their northern frontier,--a precaution often as vain as it was costly;
for the wily savages, covered by the forest, found little difficulty in
dodging the scouting-parties, pouncing on their victims, and escaping.
Rewards were offered for scalps; but one writer calculates that, all
things considered, it cost Massachusetts a thousand pounds of her
currency to kill an Indian.[80]

In 1703-1704 six hundred men were kept ranging the woods all winter
without finding a single Indian, the enemy having deserted their usual
haunts and sought refuge with the French, to emerge in February for the
destruction of Deerfield. In the next summer nineteen hundred men were
posted along two hundred miles of frontier.[81] This attitude of passive
defence exasperated the young men o