soners
and some bateaux-men taken by Walter Butler's Rangers near Wood Creek;
and I could scarcely endure to listen, so horrid were the details of our
soldiers' common fate, where Mohawk and Tory, stripped and painted
alike, conspired to invent atrocities undreamed of for their
wretched victims.

It was then that I heard for the second time the term "Blue-eyed
Indian," meaning white men stained, painted, and disguised as savages.
More terrifying than the savages themselves, it appeared, were the
blue-eyed Indians to the miserable settlers of Tryon. For hellish
ingenuity and devilish cruelty these mock savages, the Oneida assured
us, had nothing to learn from their red comrades; and I shall never be
able to efface from my mind the memory of what we saw, that very day, in
a lonely farm-house on the flats of the Mohawk; nor was it necessary
that McCraw should have left his mark on the shattered door--a cock
crowing, drawn in outline by a man's forefinger steeped in blood--to
enlighten those who might not recognize the ghastly work as his.

We stayed there for three hours to bury the dead, an old man and woman,
a young mother, and five children, the youngest an infant not a year
old. All had been scalped; even the watch-dog lay dead near the bloody
cradle. We dug the shallow graves with difficulty, having nothing to
work with save our hunting-knives and some broken dishes which we found
in the house; and it was close to noon before we left the lonely flat
and pushed forward through miles of stunted willow growth towards the
river road which led to Johnstown.

I shall never forget Mount's set face nor Murphy's terrible, vacant
stare as we plodded on in absolute silence. Elerson led us on a steady
trot hour after hour, till, late in the afternoon, we crossed the river
road and wheeled into it exhausted.

The west was all aglow; cleared land and fences lay along the roadside;
here and there houses loomed up in the red, evening light, but their
inhabitants were gone, and not a sign of life remained about them save
for the circling swallows whirling in and out of the blackened chimneys.

So still, so sad this solitude that the sudden chirping of a robin in
the evening shadows startled us.

The sun sank behind the forest, turning the river to a bloody red; a fox
yapped and yapped from a dark hill-side; the moon's yellow light flashed
out through the trees; and, with the coming of the moon, far in the
wilderness the owls be