n that
she might eat her. When Cornstalk's party perpetrated the massacre of
the Clendennins during Pontiac's war (see Stewart's Narrative), Mrs.
Clendennin likewise left her baby to its death, and made her escape; her
husband had previously been killed and his bloody scalp tied across her
jaws as a gag.] The man who daily imperilled his own life, would, if
water was needed in the fort, send his wife and daughter to draw it from
the spring round which he knew Indians lurked, trusting that the
appearance of the women would make the savages think themselves
undiscovered, and that they would therefore defer their attack.
[Footnote: As at the siege of Bryan's Station.] Such people were not
likely to spare their red-skinned foes. Many of their friends, who had
never hurt the savages in any way, had perished the victims of wanton
aggression. They themselves had seen innumerable instances of Indian
treachery. They had often known the chiefs of a tribe to profess warm
friendship at the very moment that their young men were stealing and
murdering. They grew to think of even the most peaceful Indians as
merely sleeping wild beasts, and while their own wrongs were ever
vividly before them, they rarely heard of or heeded those done to their
foes. In a community where every strong courageous man was a bulwark to
the rest, he was sure to be censured lightly for merely killing a member
of a loathed and hated race.

Many of the best of the backwoodsmen were Bible-readers, but they were
brought up in a creed that made much of the Old Testament, and laid
slight stress on pity, truth, or mercy. They looked at their foes as the
Hebrew prophets looked at the enemies of Israel. What were the
abominations because of which the Canaanites were destroyed before
Joshua, when compared with the abominations of the red savages whose
lands they, another chosen people, should in their turn inherit? They
believed that the Lord was king for ever and ever, and they believed no
less that they were but obeying His commandment as they strove mightily
to bring about the day when the heathen should have perished out of the
land; for they had read in The Book that he was accursed who did the
work of the Lord deceitfully, or kept his sword back from blood. There
was many a stern frontier zealot who deemed all the red men, good and
bad, corn ripe for the reaping. Such a one rejoiced to see his fellows
do to the harmless Moravians as the Danites once did to the p