the king's men, they felt equal to anything.
Only the strongest of the border settlements could hold them back. The
colonists here were so much reduced, and so little help could be
sent them from the East, that the Iroquois were able to divide into
innumerable small parties and rake the country as with a fine tooth
comb. They never missed a lone farmhouse, and rarely was any fugitive
in the woods able to evade them. And they were constantly fed from the
North with arms, ammunition, rewards for scalps, bounties, and great
promises.

But toward the close of August the Iroquois began to hear of a silent
and invisible foe, an evil spirit that struck them, and that struck
hard. There were battles of small forces in which sometimes not a single
Iroquois escaped. Captives were retaken in a half-dozen instances, and
the warriors who escaped reported that their assailants were of uncommon
size and power. They had all the cunning of the Indian and more, and
they carried rifles that slew at a range double that of those served to
them at the British posts. It was a certainty that they were guided by
the evil spirit, because every attempt to capture them failed miserably.
No one could find where they slept, unless it was those who never came
back again.

The Iroquois raged, and so did the Butlers and the Johnsons and Braxton
Wyatt. This was a flaw in their triumph, and the British and Tories saw,
also, that it was beginning to affect the superstitions of their red
allies. Braxton Wyatt made a shrewd guess as to the identity of the
raiders, but he kept quiet. It is likely, also, that Timmendiquas knew,
but be, too, said nothing. So the influence of the raiders grew. While
their acts were great, superstition exaggerated them and their powers
manifold. And it is true that their deeds were extraordinary. They were
heard of on the Susquehanna, then on the Delaware and its branches, on
the Chemung and the Chenango, as far south as Lackawaxen Creek, and as
far north as Oneida Lake. It is likely that nobody ever accomplished
more for a defense than did those five in the waning months of the
summer. Late in September the most significant of all these events
occurred. A party of eight Tories, who had borne a terrible part in
the Wyoming affair, was attacked on the shores of Otsego Lake with such
deadly fierceness that only two escaped alive to the camp of Sir John
Johnson. Brant sent out six war parties, composed of not less than
twenty wa