'll wait here a day for you. Think
it over.

"I have seen the Iroquois at the Sacandaga Vlaie. I saw Walter Butler
there, too; and the woods were alive with Johnson's Greens. The only
reason why they have not struck you here is, no doubt, because there
was more plunder and more killing to be had along the Sacandaga. But
when there remain no settlements there--when villages, towns, hamlets
are in ashes, like Currietown, like Minnesink, Cherry Valley, Wyoming,
Caughnawaga, then they'll turn their hatchets on these lone farms,
these straggling hamlets and cross-road taverns. I tell you, to-day
there is not a house unburned at Caughnawaga, except the church and
that villain Doxtader's house--not a chimney standing in the Mohawk
Valley, from Tribes Hill to the Nose. Ten miles of houses in ashes, ten
miles of fields a charred trail!

"Now, do as you please, but remember. For surely as I stand here the
militia call has already gone out, and this country must remain exposed
while we follow Butler and try to hunt him down."

The little throng of people, scarcely a dozen in all, received my
warning in silence. Glancing down the road, I saw one or two women
standing at their house doors, and children huddled at the gate, all
intently watching us.

"I want to send a message to Colonel Willett," I said, turning to the
Oneida. "Can you go? Now?"

The tireless fellow smiled.

"Give us what you have to eat," I said to Patrick Farris, whose round
and rosy little wife had already laid the board in the big room inside.
And presently we sat down to samp, apple-sauce, and bread, with a great
bowl of fresh milk to each cover.

The Oneida ate sparingly; the girl mechanically, dull eyes persistently
lowered. From the first moment that the Oneida had seen her he had
never addressed a single word to her, nor had he, after the first keen
glance, even looked at her. This, in the stress of circumstances, the
forced and hasty marches, the breathless trail, the tension of the
Thendara situation, was not extraordinary. But after excitement and
fatigue, and when together under the present conditions, two Iroquois
would certainly speak together.

Anxious, preoccupied as I was, I could not help but notice how
absolutely the Oneida ignored the girl; and I knew that he regarded her
as an Oneida invariably regards a woman no longer respected by the most
chaste of all people, the Iroquois nation.

That she understood and passionately resented thi