University of Virginia Library

1. BOOK FIRST.
THE BORDER RISING.

Ford.

Cyril Tourneur.

Massinger.

TO
WILLIAM DUER,
OF OSWEGO,
THESE VOLUMES ARE INSCRIBED
BY HIS EARLY FRIEND,
THE AUTHOR.

1. CHAPTER I.
FOREST HAUNTS AND SYLVAN COMPANY.

The Indian, by J. Lawrence.

Our story opens amid the depths of an American
forest. It was midsummer; the bright green of
June had departed from lea and meadow, and the
brooks, even where their course lay through some
grassy orchard, half sheltered by the spreading
fruit-trees, had shrunk and dwindled in their channels;
but here, amid the dank shadows of primeval
woods, their currents still danced along with all
the freshness of springtime. Here, too, the shrubs
upon their banks still wore the delicate tints of early
summer; for the canopy of dense foliage above
them shut out the scorching heat. The birds of
song, which, in the opening and closing year, are seldom
heard in our deep forests, had now left the
clearings, which they delight with their warbling

in the mating season, and flitted through the cool
and verdurous aisles that opened around on every
side; now glancing sportively around the seamed
and columnar trunks of the mossed trees, and now
skimming high in air, but still sheltered by the
cloistering architrave of interlacing boughs above
them. It was noontide, but the freshness of early
dawn and the mellow gloom of deepening twilight
were commingled in those forest glades.

By the foot of an ancient tulip-tree, where a
spring bubbled from beneath a rock, which its
gnarled roots entwined, sat two men, who seemed
the fitting tenants of a spot so wild. The one, a
military veteran of about fifty, brawny and broad-shouldered,
with freckled face and sandy hair, was
dressed in the full garb of a Scottish Highlander,
save that a jacket of green cloth, laced and guarded
with bars of silver, like the uniform of a modern
European trooper, was superadded to the tartan
drapery that marks the ancient costume of his
country. His companion, who wore a similar uniform
jacket, was, in the fashion of his other garments,
apparelled not unlike him; if a belted hunting-shirt
of dressed deerskin, with fringed leggins of the
same, and a scarlet blanket richly embroidered at
the corners with porcupine quills, may be supposed
to bear any resemblance to the kilt, hose, and plaid
of the Scotchman, whose skene dhu was imitated by
the terrible leg-knife, worn beneath the beaded garters
of his companion. With the exception of a
tomahawk secured in the wampum sash of the latter,
both were in other respects similarly armed
with pistols and yæger.

But the accidental resemblance in the fashion of
their equipments, which extended even to the ornamented
tobacco-pouch worn at the belt of either,
ceased altogether with a full survey of their persons,
when contrasting these men together. There was

nothing of the Celt or Goth in the swarthy lineaments
of the American forester. Rising to his feet,
while his blanket, dropping from one shoulder, set
forth a chest of the finest proportions, he stood at
least three inches taller than the European; while
his lithe and well-rounded limbs fell at each motion
into those easy attitudes which, among those who
call themselves civilized, are seldom exhibited in
their full grace by any but mere children, and which
were in striking contrast with the angular movements
of his sturdy and soldier-like companion.

“Well, Sachem, what see you now?” said the
Highlander, as the Indian, lightly planting one foot
on a mossed root that pushed through the rotten
sod, stood, with keen eye and dilated nostril, gazing
intently into a deep glade of the forest.

“I looked for the return of one of my runners,
but it was only a moose which stirred the leaves,”
he replied, quietly resuming his seat.

“A moose? ah! I've heard of that kind of deer.
They tell me that they are famous fellows when at
bay. But you should hunt a stag among old Scotia's
mountains to know what sport is, Sachem. You
never got as far, though, as our heathery hills, when
you visited King George.”

“There was game afoot here that would not have
let me linger in the Highlands, even had I reached
them.”

“Ah! but even to have set foot upon the bonny
purple heather, though but for once in your life,
would have been something; and yet, perhaps,
'twere better not; it might have made you discontented
with these gloomy forests that cover up your
whole country.”

“I saw many bald men among the counsellers of
my British father; but the naked crowns of the Sagernash
did not put me out of conceit of the long
locks of an Iroquois,” replied the forester, dryly,

And then, continuing in a more animated strain,
“I have not always, even in my own land, dwelt
among these forests, which you think so gloomy.
I have wandered for months over meadows laughing
with sunshine and flowers, where the purple
heather of which you speak, unless it outbloom in
richness all that I have seen in an English garden,
were but a dull garniture for the delicious fields.
And yet, though the prairies seemed so fascinating,
when in early youth I followed over them the warpath
of the great Pontiac, their charms appear to
me now but as the feeble and holyday work of Nature,
when compared with a temple like that in
which we stand. Look there,” he cried, pointing
upward to the sweeping cone of a pine that towered
some two hundred feet towards the heavens, upon
the lowest branch of which, still a hundred feet
above the soil, an eagle was at the moment lighting,
while the frayed bark, slipping from beneath
his talons, floated long in air before reaching the
ground. “Look at yon royal pine, Major MacDonald;
such trees as that will grow but once in any
soil! they are the production only of Nature in her
prime; and, as one of her doomed children that
must soon pass away, I would fain linger near them
with my people until the last is gone.”

“Doomed, Sachem? tut, tut, not a bit of doom
about the matter; we'll soon drive the rebels from
the ancient seats of your tribe; or, should the worst
come to the worst, why not leave this wild land?
You have the king's commission in your pocket, and
can still follow his majesty's banner wherever a trumpet
shall sound.”

“Never, never!” rejoined the Indian, mournfully;
“I have been tutored in your schools; I have worshipped
in your churches; I have feasted and slept
in your dwellings; I have fought side by side with
your warriors in the field; I have mingled with your

courtiers in the palace, and your counsellers in the
cabinet: but, my ways are still not your ways, nor
has the heart of Thayendanagea been ever for a moment
estranged from his tribe.”

“Why, then, did you lead them to take a part
with us in this quarrel, which, you told me but yesterday,
must eventuate in the ultimate success of
the rebel arms?”

“Why? why did not my countrymen accept the
overtures of the French king, when Frontenac made
his descent upon the cantons with a powerful army,
and our allies, the Hollanders, at whom, through us,
Ononthio struck the blow, were too feeble to aid us
save with their wishes? why, until your countrymen,
by their acquisition of this province, became
heirs of the friendship we had sworn to the Dutch,
did we stand by Quidar in his quarrel with England
to the last? Why? why did you, Major MacDonald,
who have now, with hundreds like yourself,
taken up arms for King George, why did you become
an exile by fighting against him when a stripling?”

The Scotchman sprang to his feet, and paced the
turf in agitation for a moment; then, turning short
in front of the other, exclaimed, as he clasped the
hand of the noble Mohawk in both of his own and
wrung it cordially,

“Captain Brant, you are a true and loyal gentleman,
every inch of you; worthy to have been out in
the Forty-five with the best of us; and if—”

“Hist—crouch,” interrupted the Sachem, lightly
pressing the shoulder of MacDonald, who, obedient
to the motion, sank on one knee beside him.

“I see him,” whispered the Highlander, glancing
in the direction whither his companion pointed; “a
sable roan! A most noble charger; his rider must
be near.”

“Yo-hah! a horse of eighteen hands! there are not

many such in the depths of an American forest.
Look again, brother soldier.”

“Jesu Maria!” ejaculated the European, in a tone
that might be thought to partake as much of alarm
as of wonder, if the suspicion had not been belied
by the flashing eye with which he instantly brought
his yæger to his shoulder, while the muzzle was as
quickly averted by the hand of the Mohawk striking
up the barrel.

“An old hunter looks at his range as well as at
his mark,” said Brant, in reply to an inquiring glance
of the other; and the hasty Scot, looking again beyond
his quarry, saw, for the first time, a half-naked
Indian standing immediately in his line of fire.

“I must have those antlers to match a pair from
the peat-moss in my brother's hall,” he murmured,
in a tone of disappointment.

“They shall be yours, but we must not wake
these echoes with our firearms. Leave my runner
yonder to deal with the moose, and we shall be certain
of a savoury broil this evening.”

The deer-stalker, or still-hunter, as we would
term him in this country, seemed to be fully aware
of the neighbourhood of his chief, and the precise
point where he lay; for, gliding now like a shadow
from tree to tree, and more than once fitting an arrow
to his bow, as if about to shoot, while continually
approaching the moose, he managed to place
himself so that the two witnesses of the sport could
not be harmed by the shot. The animal, in the
mean time, pestered by the August flies that are
so annoying to the larger tenants of the forest at
this season, kept moving hither and thither within
a small circle, pausing ever and anon to browse for
a moment; and still, while feeding, making the dry
branches crackle with his incessant trampling.

At last he seemed to be more contented, as he
got his feet into a marshy piece of ground, from

which the discoloured water bubbled up gratefully
about his legs, as his hoofs broke the yielding soil.
The Scotchman, who now, for the first time, had a
full view of his huge uncouth form, could not sufficiently
admire the ease with which the moose used
his ungainly but flexile snout, to twist off the branches
near him, while lazily catching at those within
his reach.

But now the movements of the still-hunter equally
claimed the attention of the lookers-on of this
quiet but exciting kind of woodland sport. The
stealthy savage, by flitting from tree to tree in the
manner we have described, occasionally drawing his
body, like a wounded snake, along the ground, had
gained a fallen and decayed trunk within twenty
paces of the moose, and, lying concealed behind
this natural rampart, was watching, with keen eye,
the fitting moment to launch his fatal shaft.

At last the moose, having stripped the boughs immediately
in front of him, yet unwilling to change
his position, threw back his broad antlers upon his
shoulders, and, twisting his neck obliquely as he
caught at a weeping birch that drooped over his left
shoulder within reach of his uplifted muzzle, presented
his throat as a fair mark for the arrow of the
hunter. The bow twanged, and the barbed flint
was driven, with unerring aim, through the neck,
severing the swollen artery, and burying itself deep
in the vertebræ at the base of the scull. The stricken
animal uttered a terrific snort of rage and agony,
plunged, reared, and, wheeling on his hind legs, made
a desperate charge at his assailant, but fell dead at
the feet of the Indian, just as the undismayed fellow
was in the act of bounding forward to encounter
him with his tomahawk.

“A good shot, Harrowah,” cried Brant, moving
leisurely from his covert; while the more ardent
Scot rushed, with drawn dirk, towards the fallen

moose, as if still hoping to have a hand in the death
of so noble a quarry. But the bright eye was already
fixed in death, though a muscular motion in
the long and drooping muzzle made the Highlander
quickly withdraw the hand which he had placed on
that uncouth appendage.

“By Saint Andrew,” he cried, “but you have an
ugly face to claim kindred with the dun deer of my
own heather.”

“Yet, major, we foresters think that the woods
afford no choicer morsel than a moose's muzzle;
and your Frenchman of Canada will serve you up
a stew of it that will shame the mock-turtle of a
London coffee-house.”

“Eat that hideous black thing?” said the Scot,
with no feeble signs of aversion; “I've dined often
upon horseflesh while serving in Tartary, but I'd
as soon sup upon the trunk of an elephant as make
a meal off that frightful big lip. Zounds! the thing
quivers as if it were still alive; like the tail of one
of your American serpents, which, they tell me,
never dies till sunset.”

The still-hunter stood, in the mean time, with
folded arms, gazing listlessly upon the scene, until,
giving a sort of grunt in reply to an order from his
chief, delivered in his own language, he addressed
himself to the care of the carcass. Selecting a
smooth-barked beech for the operation, he prepared
one of the lower limbs, by the aid of props, to sustain
the weight of the animal. But the sleight of the
slim hunter, and the united strength of his two stalwart
companions, were all put in requisition to trice
up the ponderous carcass, after the splinters, by
which it was suspended, had been passed through
the tough sinews of the gambles. The head was
then severed from the trunk, and swung by the palmated
antlers to the crooked arm of an ancient oak;
and the body, after being flayed to the loins, and relieved

of all superfluities, was wrapped in its own
hide, and raised still higher from the ground, to be
out of the reach of beasts of prey, until otherwise
disposed of.

“I will send some of my people to bring the meat
to camp before nightfall; and now, Major MacDonald,
let us learn what tidings the runner brings us.”

With these words the Sachem moved to the spot
where the reader was first introduced to him and
his companion, and where blanket and tartan, lying
where they had been dropped by the roots of the
shadowy tulip-tree, offered inviting seats for the
councils of this sylvan triumvirate.

2. CHAPTER II.
FRONTIER FACTIONS.

—M`Lellan.

The information brought to his chieftain by the
Mohawk runner, though of deep import to more
than one actor in the scenes we are about to describe,
will hardly be intelligible to the reader, unless
he revives his historical recollection of the political
intrigues that distracted the important province
of New-York, as the drama of the Revolution
was gradually unfolded along her far-spreading
borders.

The long possession of the fur-trade, and the
frequent Indian wars incident to the pursuit of this
hardy and precarious branch of commerce, had at
an early day given an adventurous and enterprising
character to the population of this province. Their
military spirit had been well tested in the arduous
campaigns of the old French war; they had borne
no feeble part in the conquest of Canada; and
when the fall of Quebec, in consummating the glory
of Wolfe, brought peace to the land, it found almost
every man capable of bearing arms a soldier.
While, therefore, the different parties of Whig and
Tory were almost equally balanced in the province
of New-York throughout the Revolution, that memorable
political struggle found fewer neutrals here
than in any state of the Union; all men were eager
to bear arms on one side or the other, and it is this
circumstance only which will account for the great
numbers that fell in battle, when the inferior degree
of population, as compared with that of several of
the other colonies, is considered.

But, bitter as were the political animosities existing
in every part of this province, both before and
after a recourse was had to arms, yet the spirit of faction
called out in no district the same stormy feelings
as now distracted the valley of the Mohawk.
The elements of civil dissension had been long
brewing in this beautiful region, where such a diversity
of origin, of interest, and, we may add, of religion,
existed among the heterogeneous population,
that the soul of Discord might well have been
roused even in times the most peaceable.

Here had been the ancient seat of the most
powerful and civilized, yet most warlike nation of
aborigines, upon the northern part of this hemisphere,
a large remnant of which still retained their
possessions in the immediate neighbourhood of the
European settlements. Here the sturdy and adventurous

Dutch trader had at an early day been
tempted to abandon his precarious means of livelihood,
and sit down to cultivate the rich alluvial
lands that had been readily granted to him by
the grateful Mohawks, who had ever been treated
as brothers by his countrymen during their sway
over the province. Hither the German soldiers
of Queen Anne's Protestant allies had in large
bodies followed their European neighbours to settle
upon the extensive tracts, granted to them when
New-York first took its modern name in passing to
the British crown. Here, side by side with these
brave mercenaries, or perched, rather, upon the
northern hills that overlooked their fertile meadows,
hundreds of Catholic Scotch Highlanders, with
many Irish soldiers of fortune, the exiled followers
of the last Stuart, had established themselves;
while successive families of the Cameronian countrymen
of the former had found their frugal homes
upon the uplands south of the river, whose cultivation
had been rejected by those who preceded them
in gaining an interest in the soil.

The diversity of feeling which this difference of
origin, of language, and of religion may be presumed
to have created, was still farther enhanced in
its effects by the difference in tenure throught which
the broad domains of the valley were held. For
while the majority of the old “residenters” were
freeholders, constituting a large and independent
yeomanry, yet among those of British descent there
were extensive feudal proprietors, holding their patents
immediately from the crown, who could number
a powerful array of dependants; and some of
whom (as was actually the case with Colonels
Butler and Johnson both before and during the
war) commanded regiments of militia, raised exclusively
among their own tenantry.

There was one feature common to this heterogeneous

people, which will hardly be thought to have
reconciled the jarring elements of strife, though
capacitating them for acting in unison under some
circumstances; and this was that, throughout the
valley, there was scarcely an individual who had
not been in some way trained to the use of arms.

The threatening storm of civil war had at an early
day found both patriot and loyalist upon the alert
to enlist the principles, the prejudices, or affections
of their neighbours upon the side that either was
determined to espouse. The leading gentlemen of
Tryon county, whether Whig or Tory, kept up indeed
for a long time the most friendly relations towards
each other, so far as outward seeming was
concerned. Both parties affected to be actuated
by the greatest zeal in preserving the peace of the
country, and particularly in all their public conferences
agreed to act in unison in preventing the
Indians from taking any part in the impending controversy,
should a fatal issue be ultimately joined
between them. But the acts of either faction seem
sufficiently to have belied their words from the first.

Secret clubs and committees were organized
upon the one side; and many of the wealthy upon
the other, keeping open house for their partisans,
made their hospitality a cloak for the dangerous
councils that were rife at the festive board. The
country was traversed by mounted men, bearing tokens
from one disaffected family to another. Travellers
upon the highways were stopped by the myrmidons
of either party, and their papers examined
by these border regulators with the coolest assumption
of authority; and as, on the one side, the great
landed proprietors soon commenced fortifying their
houses and arming and drilling their tenantry, so,
among the smaller freeholders on the other, several
of the influential Whigs ventured to reorganize the
militia in their own districts, and officers were deposed

and others appointed, according to the peculiar
tenets and wishes of the people.

This last innovation had been attended with some
danger; though in one instance, Sir John Johnson,
the leading magistrate of the county, met with a
signal discomfiture when rashly intruding upon a
party of villagers whom a lieutenant, elected by
themselves, was engaged in drilling. The baronet
chanced to be taking a drive with his lady when
he came upon this squad of young soldiers; and
incensed at seeing a man in the uniform of an officer
who he knew did not hold the king's commission,
leaped from his barouche, and advancing upon
the patriot lieutenant, rebuked his presumption with
great insolence, and called upon his comrades instantly
to disperse. Swords were drawn, and Sir
John, being the more skilful fencer of the two, disarmed
his youthful opponent, but was ultimately
compelled to retire from the levelled muskets which
were instantly presented at his life, when he attempted
to push his advantage, by seizing the young
man and securing him as a traitor to the king taken
in open arms.

Convinced, by this and similar scenes, of the unpopularity
in that part of the province of the cause
which he had espoused, the zealous baronet addressed
himself to the promotion of his royal master's
interest in another quarter; and, in defiance of
the implied stipulation existing between both parties
of the whites, that the Indians should not be
permitted to take a part in the family quarrel, as it
was called, he proceeded to avail himself of his
connexion with the tribes, to influence them to raise
the tomahawk against his political opponents. His
brother-in-law, Col. Guy Johnson, the superintendent
of Indian affairs for all the provinces of British
America, readily lent his powerful aid to the furtherance
of these intrigues; and the vigilant Whigs,

while keeping a wary eye upon the powerful Tory
families in their neighbourhood, soon became aware
that Indian runners were continually passing and
repassing between the settlements and the straggling
troops of warriors that hovered on their border.
The moose-hunter was one of a hundred similar
agents of frontier diplomacy, that were continually
traversing the country between Guy Park, the
seat of the Indian agency, and the different council-fires,
or outlying bands of the Six Nations.

Sir John Johnson's numerous tenantry of Scotch
Highlanders were already in arms at Johnstown,
where the baronet had fortified his large mansion
with several brass fieldpieces; and the different cantons
of the Iroquois, with the single exception of
the Oneidas, were known to be so favourably disposed
toward the royal cause, that the only question
was now, how to unite the whole force, both
European and aboriginal, so as to make it most effective,
and overwhelm at its first outbreak the least
movement of rebellion; this, however, required no
feeble energies to accomplish.

The yeomanry of the valley had long regarded
Sir John Johnson with a suspicious eye; alike
from the baronial state that he affected upon his
princely domains, and the insolent and dictatorial
assumption with which he more than once intruded
upon their popular assemblies. Colonel Guy
Johnson, the superintendent of the Indian department,
was held in hardly less aversion than his
kinsman, and the celebrated Joseph Brant, or Thayendanagea,
as he called himself, who filled the important
post of secretary of that department for “all
his majesty's provinces in North America,” had,
from his political connexions, lost much of the confidence
of his old friends. Brant, indeed, though
living upon the most intimate terms with many of
the leading Whigs of Tryon county, was always

suspected to hold himself in readiness for employment
more congenial to the tastes of an Indian warrior,
who, amid all the allurements of a European
court, and when surrounded by every luxury and
embellishment of civilized life, had made it his pride
and his boast that he was a “full-blooded Mohawk.”

That haughty chief, who, whether at the entertainments
of princes and nobles, in the saloons of
fashion, or the palaces of royalty, had always persisted
in presenting himself in the peculiar costume
of his people, seemed to have brought home but
little from his European intercourse with the learned
and the polite, save a strong feeling of attachment
to the British crown: a sentiment of feudal
loyalty, which, notwithstanding his early New-England
education, had become strangely grafted upon
the peculiar love which he bore to the ancient republican
institutions of the Five Nations. He
seemed to regard England as the only muniment
of their freedom, and was willing to render a cordial
allegiance to her as the price of the protection;
and while, in his intercourse with the whites, arrogating
to himself a full share of that assumption
which induced his semi-barbarous countrymen to
call themselves the Ongi-honwe, or “men who surpassed
all others,” he was still willing to look up
to the head of the British empire both as the fountain
of public honours and the guardian of his country's
welfare.

But while this aspiring and sagacious sachem saw
that the safety of his people and his own pre-eminence
as a chieftain depended upon their siding with
the royal cause—for at a very early day he foretold
the blighting influence which this great overshadowing
republic would bring upon the aborigines when
its independence was fully established—yet his private
partialities were from the first at war with the
dictates of his ambition and his policy. He had

been educated in one of the leading Whig families
of Connecticut; he had fought side by side with
the colonial troops in “the old French war;” and
though he had derived preferment, fortune, and influence
from his connexion with the officers of the
crown, yet his old friends and neighbours in the
valley of the Mohawk were adherents of the popular
cause; and, save among the powerful family of
the Johnsons, his nearest and dearest friends, the
comrades of his hunts, the companions of his youth,
were banded together against the party which he
had joined. What wonder, then, that when the
storm of revolution was about to burst upon his native
valley, Brant should shrink from imbruing his
hands in the blood of its inhabitants, sprung from
the same soil, though of a different lineage from
himself?

These considerations will sufficiently account for
the noble Mohawk so long endeavouring to temporize
with the patriot party; and, when finally taking
up arms with the loyalists, presenting himself with
a few followers, instead of bringing his whole power
into the field, after having already made a proud
display of his warriors in his celebrated pacific interview
with the republican general, Herkimer. It
would appear, however, from some of his numerous
letters still extant, that true Indian policy was not a
little mingled with the unwillingness he showed to
procure the gathering of the tribes, when all of the
Iroquois confederates, with the exception of the single
canton already mentioned, were eager to lift the
hatchet for the mother country.

Brant thought that the family quarrel was of
doubtful duration, and he was unwilling that the
brunt of it should fall upon his people until England
had tried what she could do to repress the rebellion
in the province of New-York, without having recourse
to the aid of the Indians. He left it, there

fore, for Col. Guy Johnson to collect the warriors of
the Six Nations, while he, with a chosen band of his
own Mohawks, hovered near the border, watching
the turn events might take, and still secure in the
deep forests where we have first introduced him to
the reader.

These mountain wilds, which are now chiefly
embraced in the counties of Montgomery, Herkimer,
and Hamilton, still preserve much of their
savage and romantic character; but, at the day
of which we write, they were almost inaccessible
to any but an Indian or a hunter of the border.
Here the chieftain held his woodland court, until
the issue should be fairly joined between the high
parties that now so threateningly lowered upon each
other; and here he awaited the fitting moment,
when the contest should be fairly begun, to make
the most advantageous descent upon the lower
country, and, by some brilliant exploit at the first
outbreak of Indian hostilities, make good his haughty
claim to be considered as the great captain of all
the Indian nations that should take up arms on the
side of the crown.

In the mean time, however, Sir John Johnson had
assiduously kept up his influence with the wary but
aspiring sachem; not only by a constant correspondence;
not only through the various Indian runners
who were continually bearing messages between
himself and Brant,[1] but also by placing near him a
zealous and sagacious Scotch officer, who, being
made the bearer of a commission of captain in the
royal army, which had been politically bestowed
upon Brant, made his way to the camp of the gratified
Mohawk, and remained among his people under

the easy pretence of wishing to become initiated
in the wild sports of the aborigines.

Leaving these two partisans of the royal faction
to discuss the tidings which had just been brought
them by the moose-hunter, let us now learn their
nature by shifting the scene to the valley of the
Mohawk, and proceed with the action of our story.

3. CHAPTER III.
THE LIBERTY-TREE.

—Sprague.

Rumours of the first blood shed at Lexington had
reached the valley of the Mohawk; but the length
of time it required in those days to traverse the intervening
country, prevented the story from being soon
confirmed in all its particulars; when, one afternoon,
it was noised abroad that a messenger, direct
from the scene of action, would address the friends
of liberty at a meeting to be held in front of the
stone church at German Flats. The occasion was
deemed a good one, by the leading Whigs of the
neighbourhood, for carrying into effect a favourite
political ceremony of the day, which should at once
mark their own adherence to the popular cause, and,
by its boldness, encourage and confirm their wavering
friends. To further which intention, placards
and notices were industriously circulated, inviting
the people to “assemble unarmed, for the purpose
of peaceable deliberation, and also to erect a liberty-pole!”

The yeomanry of the valley had been frequently
thus convened of late, to pass some vote of censure
upon the acts of the British ministry (for here, as
elsewhere throughout the provinces, during the early
stages of the Revolution, the name of the king
was studiously omitted in all the attacks upon his
government); and, like well-schooled fencers closely
practised in mock-combat, the thoroughly organized
community was versed in political discussion
and habituated to public business, long before its
ability for self-government was tested in a real
struggle with established power. But the measure
now in contemplation was a direct assault upon the
dignity of the crown; and the call “to assemble
unarmed for the purpose of peaceable deliberation,”
was too flimsy a covering for the treasonable deed
to which it was meant only as a precursor—the raising
openly the great emblem of rebellion.

Many, therefore, shook their heads, and stood
aloof from those who, they thought, were rashly
precipitating matters to a crisis. Some doubted
whether an immediate revulsion of public feeling
might not result from carrying proceedings at once
so far. Some actually felt this revulsion, and stood
prepared to co-operate with the Tory magistracy
in crushing so daring an outbreak of faction. But
others, who, from the first, had counselled more daring
measures, and had lately hung back in disgust
at the cautious, and, apparently, reluctant movements
with which they thought their leaders had impelled
the ball of revolution, were now emulous to spring
forward and take their place among the most active
in hurrying it onward. While others, again, knowing
no other principle than the love of change, no
impulse save that of curiosity, were urged, by the
novelty of the occasion, to be spectators of a scene,
where, if sympathetic excitement should impel them

to become actors, circumstances would determine
the part they should play.

Such an assemblage was the true field for a popular
orator to prove his powers; and tradition still
tells of the eloquence which wrought upon those
materials, and moulded and moved the mass as one
man, on that day. Tradition, too, tells especially
of one speaker—a youth of scarce twenty summers
—a shy student from Schenectady, who, fired by the
impassioned appeals of older and more practised
orators, burst through the bashfulness of inexperienced
youth, and, leaping upon the rostrum, poured
forth a flood of eloquence that hurried along the
most sluggish natures upon its irresistible tide.

“Who,” said a by-stander to a sturdy hunter, who,
with mouth agape, and eyes riveted, as if by magic,
upon the speaker, stood leaning upon his rifle near,
“who in all natur is that springald with sich a
tongue?”

“Why, Adam, is it you, man, that axes me who
young Greyslaer, of Hawksnest, is? You've seen
me teaching the boy afore now, when he came up
to Johnstown in his hollowdays, and, thof he be
grown a bit, you ought to know my old scholard.”

“Lor! Balt, that ain't the bookish chap that you
larnt the rifle to? The bold younker that stood the
brunt, when scapegrace Dirk de Roos got into that
scrape in old Sir William's time?”

“I tell you it is, though,” said the woodsman,
proudly; “and a right proper shot I made of him.
You see, now, how he plumps his argerments right
into the bull's-eye of the matter.”

“Sarting! he does make a clean go-ahead of it.
But when did he come up here to mix in our doings?”

“He? why, man, he's been here this four week,
and came up too with the Congress's commission
in his pocket, to raise a company. Who but him

was it that Sir John raised a rumpus with at the
training last week? Ah! if the boy only had as
good larning with the sword as he has with the
rifle, the baronet could never have filliped it out of
his hands so sarcily as he did.”

“Oh! yes, I heerd of that, Balt, as also how you
came near having your heels lifted higher than your
head, for threatning to blow Sir John clean through
if he did not let the stripling go.”

“I'd like to see the day when any of Sir John's
folks would try to back that brag of his'n. I'd a
mounted him upon the spot only for making it, but
the people said 'twas only words, and I must not
mind sich, and go and make further fuss, seeing
we had got young Max out o'his hands. But hist!
what's the lad saying now?”

“I mistrust that that's the Yankee messenger
he's introducing to the people,” said Adam, in a
modest whisper; for the hunter had gained tenfold
in the respect of the simple yeoman since this popular
display of his pupil.

“Behold,” cried the speaker, interrupting himself
in the midst of a bold apostrophe to Liberty, whom
he pictured as hovering over the land with wings
that shadowed it but for a moment, until she could
alight in peace and safety: “Behold the harbinger
of her first triumph! fevered with haste, worn with
impatient travel, he comes, like the victorious courier
from Marathon of old, to tell of Freedom's
bloody dawn at Lexington. Up, man, up, and tell
a tale that never can grow old, but freshens from
the frequent telling;” and, suiting the action to the
word, the youth, carried away by the enthusiasm
of the moment, seized the courier by the wrist, and
dragged the embarrassed man forward.

“Now that awkward loon, Adam,” said the hunter,
“will make a botch of the hull business. A
murrain on the Bosting folks that sent a critter what
couldn't speak.”

“Why, Balt, I guess they want all their speakers
to hum, and raaly I don't see but this chap has done
all in natur that was required of him, in coming
here so quick. It wan't judgmatical in young Max
to expect more from him, and pull the fellow up
there to gape about like a treed 'possum.”

The orator appeared himself to be instantly aware
of his error, and, even while the worthy Adam was
commenting upon it, had, with ready tact, turned
the poor fellow's confusion to advantage. “What!”
he cried, “bewildered, my friend, by the crowd of
heads you see below? This stout array of gallant
yeomen, the bone and sinew of our land, numbers
not half of those devoted to our cause, that will soon
pour from every glen and mountain near; men with
tongues as slow as yours to boast their deeds, but
having still the iron will to work them; men with
arms as strong as yours to raise the tree of Liberty,
and hearts as true to guard it.”

A deafening shout of applause burst from the
multitude almost before the last words had passed
the speaker's lips. The stout-limbed New-Englander,
changed at once from a shamefaced rustic
into the hero of the scene, threw up his head,
broadened his chest, and displayed his stalwart
frame with honest vanity. Then, as if wit had
been suddenly born of praise so well applied, he
leaped from the scaffold, and seizing a tall hickory,
which, freshly deracinated, was held erect by some
labourers near, he bore it, amid the plaudits of the
crowd, to a hole that had been previously prepared,
and, spurning the aid of some tackle erected upon
the spot, tossed the heavy sapling from his shoulders,
and planted it pointing to the skies.

The centre of attraction was now changed, as
the crowd collected around the spot, while those
who stood nearest were active in throwing earth
and stones around the roots, to secure the tree in

its position. The preconcerted act of rebellion for
which they had chiefly met was fully and successfully
consummated, but any farther measures which
might have been contemplated by the leaders of the
assemblage, were at this moment summarily discomfited.

The trampling of hoofs, and the dust arising from
a large body of horsemen at a turning of the road,
gave the first intimation of the approach of the royalists,
while proclaiming that they came in sufficient
force to crush any violent outbreak of insurrection.
There was a momentary panic in the
assemblage, and, before they could recover from the
surprise, Sir John Johnson, with a large body of
retainers armed with sword and pistol, rode into the
midst of the unarmed multitude. He was followed
by Colonels Claus, Butler, and Guy Johnson, a civil
magistrate by the name of Fenton, and other Tory
gentlemen of the county, each backed by a strong
party of followers similarly armed, who successively
drew up in military array so as nearly to encircle
the astounded Whigs.

“What mummery is this?” demanded the haughty
baronet, glancing round fiercely at those who stood
near the Liberty-tree, while more than one, over-awed
by his bearing, attempted to slink away in
the crowd. A stout Whig, by the name of Sammons,
stepped boldly forward to make reply; but,
before he could ascend the stage to place himself
upon a level with his mounted adversaries, Sir John
had thrown himself from his horse, and occupied
the place from which Greyslaer and the Boston
emissary had descended a few moments before.
Without noticing the movement of Sammons, he
at once commenced haranguing the people with
great vehemence. He appealed to the ancient love
they had borne his family, rehearsed the virtues of
his father, once so popular throughout the valley,

and exhorted them still to sustain the established
magistracy, which had ever kept their best interests
at heart. Finding, then, that the attempt to address
their affections and rekindle the faded ashes of
loyalty met with no response, he endeavoured to
awaken their fears. He dwelt upon the strength
and power of the king, and painted in strong colours
the folly of opposing his officers and revolting
against the crown. But the assemblage was
still mute; the approving plaudits of his own partisans
called forth no echo from the moody and stubborn
Whigs.

Irritated at their sullen obstinacy, Johnson now
turned disdainfully from the “motley crew of
would-be patriots,” as he in derision termed the
multitude generally, and poured out his invective
upon their leaders. The shrewd New-England
features of the Bostonian next caught his attention,
and the sharp eye of Sir John instantly detected
something in the man's air or apparel which might
have escaped any gentleman but the owner of
beeves and hemlock forests, whose revenue depends
so much upon the trade of a tanner.

“Who,” he asked, scornfully levelling his finger
at the stout yeoman, “who are the real leaders
of your mongrel crew, the vultures that ye bring
hither to hatch the egg of treason, that creatures
as foul and contemptible have thrust into our nest
of peace and loyalty? An itinerant New-England
leather-dresser! a vagrant pedler of rebellion! that
could only retail his wares to such offscourings of
society as many I see around me, if men whose
education should teach them better, had not misled
the gallant yeomanry, that I grieve to find in
such disgraceful company. You have had your
musters, too, your military gatherings, your array
of fools, that would fain play the soldier, with such
a beardless stripling as that to lead them. I know

the boy!” cried he, with a smile of scorn, pointing
to Greyslaer, who stood with folded arms and compressed
lips, as if with difficulty restraining the ire
that boiled within him. “I know the boy; I knew
him in old Sir William's time, who was once dear
to all of you; he was whipped then by my father's
overseer for plundering an orchard! Pity that the
lash had not—”

“Liar and villain!” shouted Greyslaer, springing
forward toward the stage.

“Seize the traitor!” cried Sir John, striking at
the youth with the butt of a loaded whip. Actively
evading the blow, Greyslaer succeeded in
getting one foot on the scaffold, but the next instant
the sturdy baronet had fastened a grip upon his
throat, and flung him backward into the arms of
one of his myrmidons, who quickly placed himself
astride the prostrate stripling.

“She must keep quiet now, or te tirk will pin
her,” said the brawny Highlander, who held him
thus in durance, smiling grimly the while at the ineffectual
efforts of Greyslaer to free himself, in spite
of the drawn dagger that flashed before his eyes.
The trusty Gael, in the mean time, might have felt
less comfortable in his position, had he known that
he was covered by the deadly aim of the hunter
Balt, whose cool discretion prevented him from
firing, save in the last extremity.

The benignant Mr. Fenton pressed near to Sir
John, as if about to intercede in some way, but the arrogant
soldier heeded not his well-meant offices. An
indignant murmur arose among the Whigs at witnessing
this scene; and, upon a slight movement
made among them, weapons were drawn, and a low-browed,
lank-haired, saturnine man, whose age
might be somewhere about thirty, a trooper in Colonel
Butler's train, spurring to the front, snapped

his pistol in the face of a bystander. He was instantly
reprimanded in sharp terms by his superior.

“What! fire on an unarmed man, Walter?
Shame on ye for one wearing the king's livery!
May I eat hay with a horse, if I suffer such a thing
among my riders, Watty.”

“We shall have to cut these rebel throats sooner
or later,” replied the man, doggedly, “and it matters
not when the business is begun.”

“Shame, shame,” cried Mr. Fenton.

“Walter Bradshawe,” said Greyslaer, without
making an effort to rise or gain any advantage to
protect himself from the consequences of what he
was about to say, “you, though so much my senior,
were for months my mate at school. I knew you,
too, as an aspiring attorney's clerk in my first years at
college; your political career has since made your
name common in the mouths of all men, and there
must be others here who know you full as well as
I; and when I say that, as boy and man, you were
ever a brute and a ruffian, there's not a man present
that can gainsay my words.”

“Tut, tut, boys,” cried Colonel Butler, restraining
a fierce movement of his subaltern, “may I eat
hay with a horse, but this is a foolish pair on ye
here. There's trouble enough without your brawling,
and you may soon have an opportunity of fighting
out your quarrel in the name of king and country,
without troubling older people with your capers.”

A glance of deadly hatred from Bradshawe, which
was returned with one of utter scorn from his quondam
schoolmate, was all the reply the young men
made to this speech. In the mean time, notwithstanding
the dismay which the sudden appearance
of the armed royalists had inspired, there were no
signs of dispersion among the patriot assemblage.

A few craven spirits had, indeed, slunk away, but
their absence was more than supplied by a number
of sturdy countrymen, in the guise of hunters, who,
with rifle on shoulder, came straggling into the
scene of action, as if brought thither only by accident
or curiosity. The Tories, who had trusted only
to their arms to give them a superiority over the
party, which from the first outnumbered them, began
soon to be aware that they were fast losing their
only advantage; and Colonel Guy Johnson, acting in
his capacity of a county magistrate, saw that it was
true policy to close by an act of civil authority the
duties which had been entered upon with a less
peaceful mission. He therefore addressed the people
anew, but in terms more soothing than those
which had been adopted by his kinsman the baronet;
though, like him, he commenced by trying to
awaken their old feelings of feudal attachment to his
family.

He spoke of the affection which they had always
borne to his father-in-law, Sir William Johnson,
now but a few months deceased, and who was believed
to have been brought to his grave from anxiety
of spirit at the perturbation of the times, and
the struggle between loyalty and patriotism, as the
crisis approached when he should be compelled to
decide between his king and his country. He said
that he saw many around him who were the old
friends and playmates of his youth, and who, till the
last, had always been cherished guests at his table.
And he appealed particularly to the influential families
of the Fondas, the Harpers, the Campbells, and
the Sammonses, several members of which were afterward
so distinguished in the border war of Tryon
county, to unite with him in his exertions to prevent
the effusion of blood among their mutual kindred
and neighbours. Finally, after regretting the

necessity of placing young Greyslaer in the custody
of the sheriff until he could be tried by his country
in fair proceedings at law, he made a signal to Sir
John, who had already placed the prisoner on horse-back
in the midst of his retainers, and bowing politely
to the company, the complaisant colonel moved
off in the rear of his retiring party.

The people, in the mean time, either too much
confused by the unexpected events which had succeeded
each other, or confounded by the fair and
polite words which had last been addressed to
them, made no movement to the rescue. But the
sound of the retiring troopers had scarcely died
upon the ear, before a deep murmur of disapprobation
pervaded the assemblage. Some reproached
each other with pusillanimity in having looked so
calmly upon the scene which had just been enacted
before them. Those who were armed were told
that they should never have permitted one of their
friends to be thus torn from among them. And
those who had been instrumental in getting up the
meeting without providing for such an exigency,
were rebuked by the riflemen, who had come last
upon the scene of action, because they did not direct
them what part to take when the difficulty
came on, of whose origin the new-comers were
themselves ignorant. These mutual bickerings and
recriminations, however, which only temporarily
suspended the unanimity of council, resulted at last
in a general call for immediate action. Every one
agreed that young Greyslaer must be at once delivered
from the hands of the Johnsons, who, notwithstanding
their promises, would doubtless seize the
first opportunity of transporting the youth to Canada,
where, if his fate were a no more cruel one than
perpetual imprisonment, he would be at least utterly
lost to the cause.

The hunter Balt, who had stood moodily looking
on without taking any share in these discussions,
seemed to catch new life from the determination,
when announced.

“I don't know,” said he, looking round, “whether
or not ye all mean to stick to what you say; though
I hope so, raaly. But I do know, that if young
Max Greyslaer be not as free as any man here,
afore one wilted leaf of this tree falls to the ground,
I'll water it with the best blood of the best Tory in
the county! That's right, Adam, jist empty another
gourd upon the roots, the poor thing looks thirsty.”

How the hunter's vow, and the resolve of his excited
compatriots, were carried into effect, may be
best told in another chapter.

4. CHAPTER IV.
THE FIRST SHOT.

Hillhouse.

It was the middle watch of a summer's night.
The shadows lay deep on fell and forest; but
above, the waning moon shone bravely out in the
blue heavens. The night was calm; so calm, so
still, that the murmur of myriads of insects grating
their wings amid the leaves, made, as it were, “a silence
audible.” As the moon gradually approached
the horizon, leaving the stars only to gladden the
welkin, this creeping symphony appeared gradually
to have its concord broken in upon by sounds
which, though similar in character, did not completely
harmonize with the others. A humming
noise, like that of a huge beetle booming through
the air, first broke the tiny chorus. It was answered
by the harsh discord of a locust, who seemed to rap
his wings with angry impatience, like some old fellow
jostled by his mate in the midst of a nap. His
ire was reproved by a pert young katydid, whose
shrill tones indicated that her wings were only half
grown, and that the froward thing must be the earliest
of the season. Then followed sundry orchestral
croaks of a tree-toad, which in turn were replied
to by the deep diapason of some sturdy bullfrog.
At last the feathered tribe seemed preparing to join

in this nocturnal concert. The timid and delicate
note of the night-sparrow, rising distinctly fine from
a clump of maples, was answered by the shrill and
petulant cry of the whippoorwill from the lower
boughs of a broad-armed oak, that stood singly in
an open glade of the forest.

With the last call the woods became suddenly
mute, but the next moment the spot was alive with
a dozen dusky figures that glided from the adjacent
thickets towards the trysting-tree.

“Well answered, my mates,” cried an active
woodsman, leaping from the oak into the midst of
them; “are we all together? I see nothing around
me but hunting-shirts. Ah! all right,” he added,
as some thirty men, in parties of three each, came
cautiously forward from blind by-path and tangled
forest lair, where the hunters had answered each
other's signals while guiding the rest to the place of
rendezvous.

One of the last comers, who were all in the ordinary
dress of citizens or plain farmers, now advanced
to the first speaker, and, catching his hand, said,
while wringing it cordially, “Most neatly managed,
my sturdy Balt. You have brought us safely and
quietly together when I apprehended the worst
from the outlying spies of Sir John's Indian rabble.
And now, gentlemen, as you have chosen me your
leader in this business, I pledge my life to its accomplishment
under the present auspices.”

“Why, you see I told you, Major Sammons, that
we hunters didn't live among the Injuns for nothin',
for where'd be the use of consorting with the redskins
if you didn't catch some of their edication
from the cunning varmints? And you've all seen to-night
that the woods afford calls, jist as many and
as good calls as a bugle has, for making men act in
concort, where they can't see a signal no how. But

now my say's over; and let's hear the crowing of
the game-cock of Caughnawaugha—axing your
pardon, major, for the freedom.”

“Are we all armed?” said Sammons, glancing
around the group; “Colonel Fonda, you and young
Derrick de Roos have, of course, your side-arms
with you.”

“Ay, ay, sword and pistol both for me. But
carry on, carry on, major, we are all ready, man,
and up to anything; carry on, carry on.” The gay
youth who thus spoke with so little show of deference
to his seniors, was a curly-headed, fair-faced
gallant of about three and twenty. His features
were frank and good-humoured, and certainly prepossessing
in the main, though something of sensuality,
if not of dissoluteness, in their cast, slightly
vulgarized by broadening their natural recklessness
of expression.

“Peace for the nonce, mad Dirk,” cried Sammons,
somewhat impatiently. “Kit Lansingh,”
he continued, turning to a tall and modest-looking
young hunter in a green rifle frock, “you are a
model for such younkers to dress their manners by.
Captain Vischer, Helmer, Veeder, I see you are
prepared. Ah! Adam, that was well thought; you
are not used to a sword, and your pitchfork may do
good service. Bleecker, you must lay aside that
fusee, or draw the charge; not a shot must be fired
unless Balt and his hunters, who are to cover our
retreat, should find it necessary to use their rifles.
Doctor, we'll trust you with your pistols; but, remember,
they must remain in your belt. Clyde,
your axe is well thought of; but where's Wentz
with his crowbar?”

“Black Jake has the crow, and I've brought along
this suckling trip-hammer with me.”

As the brawny blacksmith answered thus, he

raised a ponderous sledge from the sod upon which
it rested, and threw it into the hollow of his arm as
carelessly as if it were some light bawble he was
handling.

With these, and a few more brief and rapidly
given directions, the Whig leader soon marshalled
his zealous forces, a large proportion of which had
come a day's journey or more through the woods to
the place of rendezvous, some two miles west of
Johnstown.

A short walk of a few minutes found the party in
the immediate neighbourhood of Sir John Johnson's
fortified mansion, when a halt was ordered for the
purpose of adopting some new precautions in making
the circuit of the building.

“Now, major,” whispered Balt, approaching the
ear of the leader, “if you'll only say the word,
we'll make a clean business of it at once. Here
are fifty as good fellows as you'll find in old Tryon.
Sir John has but a hundred of his Highlanders with
him; and when I pick off that sentinel whose blunderbuss
gleams agin the casement yonder, you've
only to dash right into the hall and take the bloody
Tory, with all his papish crew.”

“The time is not yet come for that, my worthy
fellow,” answered Col. Fonda, who overheard the
request; “Sir John is an old neighbour of many of
us. His father was the friend of my father; he
was born here in the valley among us; his mother
was one of our own people; he may yet think better
of his course, and determine to act with his
countrymen against the tyrannical ministry.”

“The colonel says right,” rejoined Sammons.
“And though Sir John has already dealt harshly
with me and my brothers during the troubles, yet I
am not the man to hurry him on to his fate, and make
him irretrievably commit himself on the wrong side

of the quarrel. No; let us pass on, my friend;
we came only to rescue Max Greyslaer, and we will
harm no one save those who interfere in the attempt
to liberate him.”

And adding aloud some words, which were intended
as much to regulate the over-excited zeal of his
younger followers as to repress that of the daring
woodsman, he dismissed the subject by giving the
order to advance. Throwing, then, the old mill that
was in use in Sir William's time, between themselves
and the hall, the party followed down the
rivulet north of the house, till they reached the little
bridge, memorable for Sir John's horse having fallen
dead upon it while spurring vainly to reach the bed-side
of his dying father, a few years before the period
of our story; and shortly after the whole band
entered the village of Johnstown.

The slumbering inhabitants little dreamed of the
bold deed that was meditated in the midst of them, as
the conspirators glided through their silent streets.
The party reached the jail, which stood in rather an
isolated position near the southeastern corner of the
town, and no one was yet disturbed. They drew up
in the shadow of the building, stationing themselves
before an iron wicket within a few yards of the main
entrance; the hunter Balt, at the instance of his
leader, advanced to the outer door to try the effect of
a parley with the jailer. A rap with his ponderous
knuckles upon the oaken door brought only a hollow
echo from within; and Balt, after vainly waiting
a moment or two for a more satisfactory answer,
applied his lips to the keyhole.

“Mike, Michael,” he cried; “Michael, I say!
the blasted paddy's asleep. Jake, move hither
with your crowbar—softly though—he hears.”

“I hear ye, ye loon ye; what the de'il d'ye want

with Mike at this hour of the night; a murrain
upon ye!”

“Mike, my good fellow, I come with a message
from the hall, and you must let me in instantly.”

“From the hall, eh? ye landloper; I'll hall ye, if
I get hold of your ugly self the morrow. Sir John
doesn't often send midnight messages to old Mike
in these times; you've come on a fool's business,
and that's your own, misther.”

“I know, I know you, foolish Mike; but there's
been a rising below of the Whi—, I mean the rebels.
Yorpy, the half-breed, has just brought the news
from Caughnawaugha, and Sir John wishes to move
young Greyslaer to the hall for safer keeping.”

“Let him send the sheriff, then, or a sargeant's
guard of his Scotchmen; the lazy loons have nothing
better to do than play sodger there from one
week's end to the other. Deil a bit will Michael
open jail till he does. So clear out wi' ye, or I'll
unchain the dog through the wicket.”

As the sturdy jailer pronounced these words, a
deep-mouthed mastiff, who had hitherto been snuffing
impatiently beneath the door, uttered a fierce
growl, and seeing, with the sagacity of his race, that
no exit was to be had this way, ran round to the
wicket and commenced barking furiously at the
party which was crowded near it.

“Curse the brute,” said Balt; “will no one stop
his mouth with a pitchfork?”

“Balt, your profanity would bring a blight on the
most righteous cause,” said the leader, sternly;
“stand back, and let Jake heave the door at once
with his crow; no time is to be lost.”

A sinewy mulatto, whose muscles, long exercised
in the toil of a journeyman blacksmith, seemed to
have assimilated to the tough material in which he
worked, moved to the spot and struck the crowbar

between the door and the lintel. But the blow,
though repeated for the second and third time, seem
ed to produce but little effect, until his master, rushing
forward, threw his whole weight into his gigantic
sledge-hammer, in the same moment that the
mulatto summoned all his force for one more effort.
The door went down crashing inward, while poor
Jake, who pitched himself fairly within the entrance,
was saluted on his sconce by the jailer with a huge
bunch of keys, which would have crushed the scull
of any other than a negro, and which made Jake
measure his length upon the floor.

“Harm not the faithful Irishman,” cried Colonel
Fonda, arresting with his hand the uplifted hammer
of the blacksmith; “the brave fellow has only done
his duty.”

“Thank yere honour,” answered Mike, making a
reverence as he felt his heart touched in the right
place, and quietly submitting to be secured by the
overwhelming force which surrounded him; “thank
yere honour kindly; rebel or no rebel, ye're jist the
gintleman that Mike would take service under, if Sir
John was not a kind of third part countryman, and
me beholden to him upon the top o' that, yere honour,”
added he, raising his voice, as the colonel, who
had seized the jailer's lantern, now gained the top of
the staircase.

“Max, my boy, Max Greyslaer, where are you?”
shouted Balt; “whistle but once from your perch,
my young hawk o' the mountain, and—ah, Jake,
your toothpick's the thing;” and, interrupting himself,
as he suddenly clutched the crowbar from the negro,
he dashed in a panel of the first door near him, and
the liberated young patriot was the next moment
overwhelmed with the congratulations of his friends.

Elated with their success, but still conscious that
these lawless proceedings might recoil severely

upon themselves, the band of Whigs unanimously
determined to seize the sheriff, who had been the
willing instrument of the Johnsons in depriving
Greyslaer of his liberty, and hold him as an hostage
for their own safety. This gentleman, a brave and
zealous loyalist, chanced to be absent from home,
passing the night with his friends at the hall. But
his house was left in charge of one of his myrmidons,
equally determined in character with the sheriff
himself.

This redoubtable fellow, of German parentage,
and who, under the name of Wolfert Valtmeyer, or
Red Wolfert, as he was more generally called, became
afterward the terror of the border, was a hunter
by profession; and, though impatient of restraint,
reckless of temper, and wholly undisciplined in character
for the ordinary purposes of social life, he was
well suited, not less by his remarkable strength and
activity, than by his hardihood and love of daring enterprise,
to fill the station of a bailiff among the
frontier community around him. In this capacity
he had, in former years, been frequently retained
upon an emergency, when his services were temporarily
in demand; but the life of a free hunter
was so dear to him that he could never be persuaded
to undertake the permanent duties of a
sheriff's officer. Indeed, the love of his personal
liberty and freedom from all responsibility was so
strong in Valtmeyer's bosom, that it seemed to
leave room for one only other sentiment—a grasping
desire after gold to procure him immunity from
labour, and the free indulgence of his lawless pleasures.

Wolfert Valtmeyer, being such as we have described
him, was not long in making up his mind
which of the two contending civil factions to side
with. For, while property, and the consequent

means of rewarding his services, was in his county
chiefly on the side of the Tories, he was already
indebted to some leading individuals among this
party for rescuing him from punishment as a felon,
and conniving at his escape to a distant part of the
country. Rumours of his death were subsequently
put in circulation, while all legal investigation gradually
died away so completely, that Valtmeyer now
ventured, amid the confusion of the times, to steal
back to his old haunts, and even offer his secret
services to the magistracy of the county. Though
the difficulties with the crown had so lately commenced,
yet he had already given signal proofs of
his zeal in sustaining the royal cause; nor was he
wanting in courage and conduct upon the present
occasion.

The house of his principal being sufficiently far
from the jail for Valtmeyer not to overhear the commotion
that had already taken place, he was awakened
in the dead of the night by the angry shouts
and imprecations of the crowd that rushed thither,
and called from beneath the windows for the sheriff;
but, undismayed equally by the suddenness of the
attack and the strength of those who came in such
force to assail the person whom he represented,
Valtmeyer only greeted the uproar with a muttered
oath or two, as he prepared to meet the occasion.

“Heilege Kreuz Donnerwetter! but I will make
the hide of one hound smoke for it;” and, growling
thus, he leaped half naked from his bed, snatched a
loaded pistol from its case, and threw open the window-sash.
“Now, verfluchter kerl, look well to
thyself,” muttered the ruffian, as he singled out for
his aim the leader of the party, who was standing in
the porch apart from his followers. Raising his
voice then, and at the same time imitating, as nearly
as possible, that of the absent sheriff,

“Is that you, Sammons?” he cried.

“Yes,” was the prompt reply.

“Then take that for a d—d burglarious rebel.”

A ball whizzed past the head of the sturdy Whig,
and buried itself in the doorpost beside him.
“This,” says the historian, “was the first shot fired
in the Revolution west of the Hudson.”

Though happily uninjured by the bullet, yet it
glanced so near that the patriot leader recoiled as it
grazed his temples, and his followers, thinking that
he was about to fall, forgot, in the quick thirst of vengeance,
the order they had received from his lips
an hour before. A dozen rifles were instantly discharged
into the open window, but a scornful shout
from the bold Tory within told that their fire
was ineffectual. A tumultuous rush at the door
was the next movement of the infuriated crowd.
It was quickly burst open, and the fate of Valtmeyer
turned upon a single cast. The foremost of
the assailing party were already upon the staircase,
and making their way to his bedroom, when the report
of a distant cannon proclaimed that their volley
of firearms had been heard beyond the precincts of
the village, and that the Tories would soon be upon
them.

“Back men, back; heard ye not our signal for
retiring? 'Tis the alarm gun fired at the Hall by
Sir John. Balt, Adam, down with ye at once!
Lansingh, Greyslaer, call off our friends, or we
shall have the bluff Highlanders upon us to spoil
our night's work before we regain the woods.”

“Don't ye hear the major, Squire Dirk?” cried
Balt, throwing his arms around that rash youth, who
still attempted to push through the crowd and mount
the stairs in the very teeth of the order that had just
been given by his leader; and lifting young De Roos
fairly from his feet, the stalwart hunter urged the
others before him through the door, and was himself
the last to retire from the scene.

5. CHAPTER V.
EVENING VISITERS.

—Bryant.

“I rayther guess,” quoth Balt, when the party
had all, by different routes, arrived at last at their
place of rendezvous in a moonlit glade of the forest,
“I rayther guess that we've stirred the game right in
airnest this night, and the best thing we can do tomorrow
is to commence running balls for a good
long hunt.”

“Our sturdy friend speaks truly, gentlemen,”
said the leader of the party, gravely, “and Heaven
only knows how the `long hunt,' as he terms it, may
terminate.”

“Be the issue what it may,” exclaimed Greyslaer,
in tones of deep fervour, while his earnest eye
kindled with enthusiasm, “the game's afoot, and
whether it lead to freedom or the grave, we must
henceforth follow the chase.”

“Why the devil, Max, do you put on the phiz
of a parson when using the lingo of a sportsman?”
cried the gay Derrick de Roos. “It becomes the
old cocks, who have drawn apart to prose under
the tree yonder, to look sermons, as well as preach
them; but for us, man, for mettlesome chaps like
us, why,

And the rattling youngster, to the great delight
of old Balt and some of the juniors, and the equal
annoyance of Greyslaer and other more thoughtful
members of the party, ran through a verse or two
of a popular hunting song, long since forgotten.

“Well, Mr. de Roos,” said Col. Fonda, coming
forward from the group, in whose councils Greyslaer
seemed to be taking an active part, from the
impatient glances he from time to time cast over
his shoulder at the singer, from whose side he had
in the mean time withdrawn; “well, sir, we have
determined to take decided measures for ascertaining
the real state of the county, and putting our
friends upon their guard, and your father's house
is spoken of as the place of our next meeting on
Thursday night.”

“The old man will be proud to entertain your
friends and mine, Col. Fonda; and yet,” added the
young man, with a degree of hesitation that showed
more considerateness than might have been expected
from his conduct a moment before; “Hawksnest
is the property of my father's ward, Max
Greyslaer there; and, after what has passed this
night, an overt act of rebellion by the present tenant,
in harbouring traitors, as the Tories call us,
might make poor Max forfeit his acres, in case the
ministry get the better in this family quarrel; some
of the grasping rogues begin already to talk of sequestrations
and such matters, you know.”

Greyslaer, upon overhearing these remarks, advanced,
and whispered to his friend, “If you be
not quizzing, according to your wont, Dirk, I congratulate
you upon the seasonable return to gravity
which your speech evinces. But, gentlemen,” he

continued, raising his voice as he turned to his other
compatriots, “I shall consider your confidence
withdrawn from me, as one unworthy to share it,
if the hint suggested by my friend De Roos—I
doubt not in all kindness—be allowed to have a moment's
weight with you. My honour is already
committed in the cause you have espoused; my life
I here pledge to it, and he can be no friend to Max
Greyslaer who holds his fortune dearer than his
life or his honour!”

These words, not less than the spirited tone in
which they were pronounced, terminated at once
all doubts as to the propriety of the step that was
meditated; and the discussion, as well as the events
of the evening, seemed at an end. The hunter
Balt, who had lounged about the while, without
venturing to intrude his advice upon those more
fitted by education than himself for council, now
brightened up, and shook off the air of listlessness
that had crept over him. He struck the butt of his
rifle smartly upon the sod, and surveying it affectionately
for a moment, as he held it thus at arm's
length perpendicular to the ground, as if to catch
inspiration from the gaze, he with becoming gravity
thus delivered himself: “Well, I only wanted
to see folks get through with their parrorching, for
you see I'm no great hand at making a speech; I've
been here to your public meetings and there to
your public meetings, and I never felt in my heart
as if natur called upon me to say anything; for
when natur does call, and right in airnest, she
speaks out of the mouths of hunters as well as of
babes and sucklings. She doesn't care, I say, much,
when she's right in airnest, what sort o' tool she
works with, jist as I've seen a good hunter, who
had got out of powder when ravin distracted hungry,
bring down a buck as slick with a bow and arrow
as if it had been his own rifle, and that, too, when he

had never used the ridiculous thing in his life afore.
Well, as I said, I'm tired of this etarnal parrorching
about the country's troubles; I only wanted to see
folks begin to make a raal thing of it, and then
Tender-Tavy—I call the iron crittur after this
fashion, gentlemen, partly out o' respect to Miss
Octavia, old Deacon Wingear, the tavern-keeper's
darter, and partly because the barrel is of so soft
a natur that I can chip it with my hunting knife.
I say, that when once there was a raal rising of the
Whigs, then this here rifle—” interrupting himself
at the word, Balt clapped to his shoulder the reputable
weapon of which he spake, and glancing
along the barrel as it gleamed in the moonlight,
beckoned with his forefinger to a shadowy figure
that stood motionless beneath a spreading chestnut
within the range of his fire, “Come in, ye varmint,
come in, ye lurching mouser from old Nick's
pantry, ye pisoned scum of the devil's copper caldron;
come in, ye scouting redskin, or Tender-Tavy
shall blow a hole through ye.”

“Fire not, Balt,” cried Greyslaer and De Roos,
both leaping at the same moment before the levelled
gun; “'tis the noble Oneida Teondetha.” And
the two young men bounded forward with outstretched
arms to greet their Indian friend.

“Bah! only an Oneida,” said the rifleman, dropping
his piece in a tone of sullen disappointment;
“I wouldn't harm the boy, pervided he comes as a
friend; but, youngsters, though you seem to be so
mighty fond of him, when you know as much of
the woods as old Balt, you'll larn that the less one
has to do with an Injun the better. Let every man
stick to his colour, is my motto.”

The momentary flash of anger that distorted the
smooth and bland features of the Indian, showed that
he partially understood the disparaging words of the

white hunter; but the disturbed expression passed
away as the gentlemen of the party, unheeding the
rude remarks of Balt, advanced with eager cordiality
successively, and gave their hands to the newcomer.

“And what news brings my young brother from
his people?” said Greyslaer, addressing the Oneida
in his own language.

“The song of evil birds has been heard in the
lodges of the Ongwi-Honwi. The Oneidas only,
of all the Six Nations, have shut their ears against
it. Their hearts bleed to know that the rest of their
countrymen are bent upon rooting out the sons of
Corlaer from the land. The Oneidas will not help
to destroy a people born on the same soil with
themselves. Their wise men say, it were better at
once to extinguish the great council fire that has
burned for centuries at Onondaga, and thus dissolve
the league of the Aganuschion. The Oneidas are
unwilling to take up the hatchet against their former
brothers, whether red or white; but they warn
you that Thayendanagea has sold the Mohawks to
the Sagernash king, and that they now walk with
your enemies.”

“What! Brant actually up in arms!” exclaimed
a dozen voices, when Greyslaer had interpreted the
information to his friends.

“He flits along the border like a foul bird in
scent of carrion. He watches the smoke of your
lodges; and, if their hearth-fires be unguarded, he
will swoop like that night-hawk upon your women
and little ones,” replied the Indian, as a dusky bird
pounced greedily upon a swarm of gnats that hovered
near.

“The wily knave must be looked after instantly,
gentlemen; we must lose no time in collecting information
respecting his movements, and determine

upon active measures at the next meeting of our
friends. But as yet we are all in the dark. If you,
Mr. de Roos, will take a scout of a dozen men with
you, and bring us some tidings of this dangerous
chieftain, it will give more shape to our proceedings.
This friendly Oneida will doubtless, with Balt and
some of his comrades, volunteer—”

“Axing your pardon, colonel, Balt don't go scouting
with an Injun in the party. Tender-Tavy
doesn't know much difference atwixt one copper
face and another, and she'd be jist as like as not,
in a dark swamp, to mistake that sleek chap for one
of Brant's people, and go off of herself. So there's
an eend o' the matter.” And the woodsman, crossing
his legs, leaned moodily upon his rifle, with an air
of dogged determination to which there was no reply.

“If Balt chooses,” said Greyslaer, “I would
rather have him with me, as I shall find difficulty
in getting my company together without assistance
in time for the meeting.”

“I don't see that, capting, as folks are now engaged
in harvesting, and you'll find them pretty
much, here and there, in bunches, holping one another.
But I feel sarcy-able in persuading some of
your wild chaps to come along, that I guess won't
move from their homes at this season for your
order, no how.”

“For God's sake, then, go with Greyslaer, you
self-willed old bear. Let's to other matters, gentlemen,”
cried De Roos, impatiently.

“If I am an old bear, I never hugged you to
harm you, young squire, when I used to carry you
as a petted brat to see me shoot pigeons from a
bough-house; besides lots of dandling in other
ways that you've had in these old—paws!”

“True, true, my excellent friend,” answered De

Roos, good humouredly, while with difficulty restraining
a laugh at the ludicrous words and accompanying
gesture with which the stout-fisted woodsman
concluded his mortified appeal to the better
feelings of the other. “I spoke but in jest, Balt,
or, at least, too hastily. And now, carry on, boys,
carry on; Kit Lansingh, Helmer, Bleecker, Conyne,
which of you lads are ready to take duty under my
command, for twenty-four hours, while we look after
Brant up by the Garoga lakes?”

Twenty voices instantly replied, all expressing
their readiness to go upon the scout; and De Roos's
only difficulty was, to select from the number those
best suited to such an expedition.

“Well, gentlemen,” said Mr. Sammons, who was
only the temporary leader of the party, and whom
we ought, perhaps, according to the worshipful custom
of our country, still to distinguish by his militia
title of major, “I believe we now all understand
each other, and had better disperse to our houses;
those of us who live near will see if they cannot furnish
a bed to our friends who have come from a
distance on the good errand of this night. Perhaps,
though, Mr. de Roos proposes a night march
with some of you?”

The young partisan needed not the hint to spur
his zeal, but, warmly seconded by his followers, he
drew off at once, and took his way through the
woods with his party, trolling as he went a voyageur's
song of the Mohawk boatmen, in which his
favourite slang phrase seemed to make the burden
of the chorus:

The low-voiced chant of the retiring party soon
died away in the distance, and their departure was the
signal for breaking up the assemblage, and the other
patriots soon dispersed, the majority taking their
route rowards Caughnawaugha, and others moving
off in different directions, two and three together, until
Balt and Greyslaer were soon left the only tenants
of the spot.

“It wants yet some hours of the dawn, capting,
and I propose sleeping them off in the woods, because
it's the best way of getting an airly start in
the morning. And we may perhaps have a good deal
of footing to do about among the farms on the off
settlements to-morrow, afore we can get your men
together. But this here is no sort of place to camp
in, with the trails of fifty men leading to it on all
sides. There's a dry swale on the other side of yon
hill, where one of my old shanties is probably yet
standing, and we'll jist take ourselves there as soon
as may be.

“I used to have shanties like this all about
among these hills wherever my traps were set,
though none so near the settlements as this,” continued
the hunter, when they had gained a rocky dell,
where the frame of a wretched wigwam, partially
covered with birch bark, was discernible to Greyslaer
after he got within a few feet of it. “You see,
now, capting, the comfort to a man who shanties
out as much as I do, of having a home all fixed and
ready for you. Here, now, is dried venison in my
katchy (caché), under those leaves, if the wood-mice
haven't got at it. There, too, I've laid away
some—but darn those gnats, I must make a smudge
afore we do anything else.”

With these words, Balt proceeded to strike a
light; and kindling first some dry leaves, he scraped
the moss from a moist stump near, and covering

up the flame with the damp material, the
thick fumes of his “smudge” soon caused the insects
to disappear. Greyslaer, in the mean time, had
stretched himself upon some hemlock boughs, spread
out beneath the shed of bark, which was barely
ample enough to keep off the dews of night; and
having refreshed himself upon the fare which the
hunter drew from his caché, he observed to Balt, as
the latter threw a fresh handful of leaves upon the
smouldering flame, “That a hunter's fire was a sort
of company for him, when passing a night in the
solitudes of the wilderness.”

“Jist the best sort of company a man can have,
capting, if he would exercise a free and independent
privilege of choosing his own. They say, you know,
that the devil hates all flames save those that are
kindled by himself; and in my hunts among the
wild hills away to the north of us, I never shanty
out without a large fire, even in midsummer. I may
be kind o' particular in this matter, but ever since I
got so terribly scared five years ago, I always love
the light of a big fire to sleep by.”

Greyslaer, instantly suspecting that the bluff
woodsman, like many a man equally bold, was the
victim of superstitious terrors, asked, with some curiosity,
what it was that had thus inspired him with
a fear of sleeping in darkness, when Balt, after a
preliminary hem or two, thus told his story.

“Why, you see, I had gone clean up to Racket
Lake to make out a pack of deer-skins for a Scotch
trader at Schenectady, hoping to get a few beaver,
at the same time, on my own account. Well, I
might ha' been in the woods a week or more, engaged
about my consarns, when, one day, after
trampoosing over a pretty smart space of country,
looking after my different traps, and, not having
seen a single deer through the livelong day, I came,

about nightfall, to a bark shanty, where some hunter
had made a pretty good camp for the night, and left
it standing. I was tired and disappinted; and, as
I hadn't spirit enough left in me even to skin a chipmunk,
if I hadn't a' found this lodge I should have
laid myself down, like a tired hound, and slept anywhere.

“But now I began to think that all sorts of luck
hadn't left me, and I spunked up and looked about
to see how I could best make myself comfortable
for the night. I had shot a brace of ducks during
the day, and the first thing to do was to build
a fire and cook 'em. But, as I had left my hatchet
at the camp from which I started in the morning,
thinking to return there and sleep, it cost me a heap
of trouble collecting such dead branches as I could
lay my hands upon, and dragging 'em together before
the shanty. And here was a pretty how-de-do
when I got 'em there; the man that built the shed
must have been a born nateral to choose such a
place for it. For, instead of picking out a patch of
firm airth whereon he might build a fire judgmatically,
he had laid the logs right down on a piece of
deep, mucky soil, made up of old roots, rotten leaves,
and sich things as go to make up a soil only fit to
raise toadstools, ghost moccasins, or timber so spongy
and good for nothing, no one can tell why natur
produces it. Well, true enough, his fire had burned
right down four feet deep into the ground, through
such truck as that; and I, of consekins, must either
remove the shanty, or go to work to get rid of the
hole, before building my fire, if I expected to get
any heat from it; and the night was pison cold, I tell
ye. So, having no shovel to fill up the pit with
airth, and ne'er an axe to fell a tree across it, I goes
mousing about, in the dark, after old rotten stumps
and fallen trunks, whose mossy wrappings keep them

damp through and through the year round, and slimy
roots, which, if they hadn't snakes under them
to nibble my fingers while tearing them up in the
dark, yet felt, for all the world, like raal sarpents in
the handling. All sich like truck that I could lay my
hands upon, I managed, with pretty hard work, to
drag together, so as nearly to fill up the hole, and,
placing my dry wood upon it, I lit my fire.

“Well, after eating one of my ducks, I dressed
and roasted the other, so as to have him ready for
my breakfast in the morning; and then, as I put my
feet to the fire and laid myself down to sleep, I felt
right comfortable. I slept and I slept, and I don't
know for how long, but it must have been a pretty
likely nap, howsomdever. Long enough for my fire
to burn so low as to get pretty deep down the hole.
But the first thing that I remember, before I waked
and diskivered that, was my dreaming of being chased
by wild Injuns, who came whooping and yelling
after me as if crazy to get my scalp. `Howh,'
`howh,' `howh,' the sound went clean down into my
ears; and, waking with a start, I saw a pair of bright
black eyes glaring at me. Had I used my own
judgmatically, I might have diskivered that these
belonged to a great antlered buck that was standing
with his fore feet fairly upon the ashes of my fire,
which made his eyes gleam unnaterally as he looked
straight into mine. But, half awake, and flurried as
I was, I snatched up a brand and flung it, with all
my might, into his face; and then, as the poor brute
scoured off, `howh,' `howh,' `howh,' a pack of wolves
came ravening on his track; tramp, tramp, I heard
them, nearer and nearer, until, fifty in number, they
dashed furiously by my fire, making the bushes fairly
winkle as their black troop swept howling on.

“Sarting, capting! I trembled like a leaf that
time, I did, until the opposite mountain threw back

the last shrieking echo from its side. I don't think
I ever knew exactly what a raal scaring was afore
that night; but, since then, I always keep up light
enough to let inquiring varmint see that it's Balt
the hunter who is sleeping in the neighbourhood,
with Tender-Tavy by his side. What, capting, snoring
already! Well, if my story has put the lad to
sleep, it hasn't been wasted to no purpose, howsomdever.”

And with these last muttered words, after mending
his “smudge” with a few handfuls of fresh moss,
the good-natured hunter lay down, and was soon
dreaming with his comrade.

6. CHAPTER VI.
PREPARATIONS FOR A FORAY.

Yamoyden.

Let us now return to the wild-wood scenery of
our opening chapter. The events recorded in those
which have followed it, were, as the reader will
readily imagine, the tidings which had been brought
to Thayendanagea by the Indian runner. The daring
acts of the Whigs had equally awakened the
indignation and the alarm of the royalist, and the
message from Sir John declared the country to be
in a state of actual revolution, and called upon Brant,
as an adherent to the government, to move at once
with his power to its support. It conveyed, too,
some slight reproach for the coolness with which
he had hitherto held himself aloof from the troubles
which an armed force might have awed into quiet;
and hinted that the best service that the chief could
now render to approve his loyalty, would be to seize
upon some prominent disaffected persons of the
county, and hand them over to the king's magistrates
as hostages for the conduct of their friends

and kindred. The heir of Hawksnest, especially,
was mentioned as a fierce zealot and turbulent young
demagogue, whom it was well to remove from his
present sphere of mischief as soon as possible.

The task thus enjoined upon Brant was a favourite
proceeding with the Tories throughout the war of
the Revolution, and was often but too successful in
its results. In the province of New-York, hundreds
were, from time to time, suddenly and secretly torn
from among their friends, and carried away to captivity
or death. Nor was there any feature of the
civil war, during that painful seven years' struggle,
more appalling than this. The boldness of the act—
for it was frequently practised in the most populous
districts, in an armed neighbourhood, in the very
capital of the province itself—struck dismay into the
families of those who were thus abducted, and the
cruel doubt and mystery which shrouded their fate
was not less frightful; for while some, with shattered
constitutions and spirits broken by confinement,
returned from the prisons of Canada after the
war was over, yet many were never heard of by their
friends from the moment of their disappearance, and
their destiny is enigmatical to this day. Nor was
it only the influential partisan or his active adherent
that was thus subjected to this hideous, because secret,
danger. The hostages, as they were called—
the victims, as they were in reality—were taken,
like those of the secret tribunal in Germany, from
either sex and from any class of society. The
homes of the aged and infirm—of the young and the
lovely, were alike subject to the terrible visitation.
The gay guest, who waved a blithe adieu to the
friends who were but now planning some merry-meeting
for the morrow, was seen to mount his
horse and turn some angle of the road in safety,
but the steed and his rider were never traced afterward.

The hospitable, festive host, who left the
revel for a moment to cool his temples in the evening
air, and whose careless jest, as he passed to the
porch without, still rung in the ears of his impatient
friends, never again touched with his lips the glass
that had been filled for him in his absence. The
waking infant cried vainly for the nursing mother,
who had left it to be watched by another for a moment.
The distracted bridegroom and fierce brother
sought vainly for the maid, whose bridal toilet
seemed just to have been completed, when, by invisible
hands, she was spirited away from her father's
halls.

“We begin our career of arms together with a
painful duty, Captain Brant,” said MacDonald,
after the chief had expressed his determination to
move instantly upon the settlements in the direction
of the Hawksnest. “I think I have heard you
speak of having been upon friendly terms with the
present tenant of this property, who, if I mistake not,
was one of your nearest neighbours upon the river
side.”

“I mean not in any way to harm old Mr. de Roos;
but this mettlesome young Greyslaer must be removed,
or he will only qualify his neck for the halter
by stirring up more treason. I shall attempt to decoy
him from the house, or, failing in that, will
surprise it with so strong a party as to make resistance
hopeless; and we shall merely ruffle the nerves
of his friends a little in seizing the springald,” replied
Brant, coolly.

“Are there no females in the family?” asked the
European, with some anxiety.

“Yes; there are two, a pair of sisters, mated in
love as closely as the kissing blossoms that tuft a
single twig in April; but no more matched in character
than is the oriole, whose lazy nest swings from

the bough beneath him, with the eagle, whose majestic
wing is circling yonder mountain. Yet the
pale girl, whom they call Tyntie, is a fair and gentle
lady, and her kindness has been owned by more
than one woman of my own kindred. But Alida,
that queenly, stag-eyed creature—surely, captain,
you have heard of the beautiful and haughty Alida
de Roos; she for whom my madcap son has conceived
so strange a hatred.”

“Of which of his sons speaks the noble Thayendanagea?”

“Of that dark and dangerous boy whom Bradshawe
has spoiled by encouraging in his wild doings;
of him who nearly compromised his father's honour
and a chieftain's name by consorting with the ruffian
Valtmeyer.”

“Valtmeyer? surely, this is not the lady whom
Valtmeyer wronged so deeply, when Bradshawe
saved his neck from the gallows?”

“The same.”

“I have heard the story,” said the Scotchman,
musingly; “I have heard the dreadful tale. But,
after being outraged so cruelly, I should have looked
rather for her resemblance in the fragile, fading girl
of whom you first spoke, than in the blooming creature
you describe as her sister.”

“Miss de Roos was scarcely more than a child
when the affair happened. Years have passed since
then. Time will do much with sorrow, pride, perhaps,
more. But, if you had ever marked the bright
and glassy glare of Alida's eyes, you would have
thought of those whom we Indians believe have become
the tabernacles of another spirit than that
which first possessed the body; and such a spirit, 'tis
said, no mortal grief can overshadow.”

“A beautiful superstition to assuage the horrors
of lunacy, but too fanciful for truth. I have heard,

indeed, of men with souls so haughty that they
would never entertain a grief, if its memory were
linked with shame to themselves or lineage, especially
if the consciousness of unmerited obloquy or
the keen hope of ultimate revenge buoyed up their
sanguine nature. But with a woman of blighted
honour—”

“You may hold there, MacDonald. That proud
girl could never be made to believe that aught of
reproach has assailed her name; though her slim
sister, they say, faints at the sound of Valtmeyer's
name, and has pined away from the moment the
ruthless villain crossed Alida's path.”

“Good God! was there no brother, no kinsman
to look after this horrible business?”

“Not one save the old father, who lived so retired
that the story never reached his ears; for Alida
was off on a visit to some friends in a distant
settlement when the abduction took place. Her
brother, young Derrick, then but a child, was with
Greyslaer, his father's ward, at school at Albany.
And he has turned out such a fiery fellow since he
came to man's estate, that no one now would dare
to hint the matter to him.”

“And had the family not one friend to lift an
arm in such a quarrel? and yet indeed it were a
delicate business to meddle with,” said MacDonald,
doubtingly.

“They had two,” answered Brant, with some
hesitation; “two friends to whom the country people
looked for dragging the offender to justice.
One of them, Walter Bradshawe, who was said to
be wooing the young lady at the time. But he
never moved in the matter, save secretly, to use
his influence in Valtmeyer's favour.”

“The base mongrel! And what said men of such
a recreant?”

“His conduct was known but to few, and those

said it sprung from a mean spirit of vengeance for
having been rejected by the lady. But this may
have been mere calumny, for parties were running
high at the time; Bradshawe was never popular,
and being a candidate for public office, his character
was roughly handled.”

“You have said the De Roos family had two
friends they might have looked to. Had the other
one, then, no influence with the magistracy of the
country?”

“He had,” said Brant, again hesitating, with
some emotion, before he made his reply; “he was
connected with them both by alliance, by political
position, and by official station; and were not the
honour of his blood involved in the inquiry, no feeling
of paternal tenderness would have prevented
him from cutting off his misbegotten offspring with
his own hand. And yet the Spirit above us knows
I love that wayward boy.” The chieftain seemed
now deeply agitated for a moment, and then turning
suddenly, so as to fix his eagle glance full upon
the eye of his companion, he added, in a stern and
almost fierce tone, “I have answered your inquiries,
sir, from no mere prating spirit that feeds an
idle curiosity. You have formed a sudden intimacy
with Au-neh-yesh; I would warn you, as a gallant
soldier of the king and a friend of the Mohawk,
against the son of my own bosom. But
though the unnatural boy has twice attempted his
father's life, yet one whisper that attaches infamy
to the blood of Thayendanagea will bring veng—”

“Spare the threat, noble Sachem; your secret is
ever safe with me. I cannot be too grateful for the
confidence you have this day reposed in me; yet
I cannot think there is anything of malignancy,
much less of meanness, in the character of Isaac
Brant, or Au-neh-yesh, as you prefer calling him.
God forbid that I should attempt to palliate his unnatural

conduct towards his father. But phrensied
as are the passions of youth, yet—”

“Enough!” said the chief, in a tone so emphatic
as at once to cut short the discussion; and then
striding forward impatiently, as if to get beyond
the reach of a reply from his companion, he added,
in a low and tremulous, but still distinct voice:
“The friend of Thayendanagea will bury this subject
for ever in his own bosom.”

A few moments afterward the two partisans
reached the clearing upon the Sacondaga, where
the principal warriors of Brant had taken up a strong
position in an elbow of the river, fortifying their
camp with mounds and palisades after the military
custom of the Six Nations.

The day was now long past the meridian, and
the chieftain lost no time in making his preparations
for a movement upon the settlements of the
“German Flats” on the morrow. After a brief
harangue to his followers, he drew out a select
band of warriors, his son Au-neh-yesh being one
of the number, for the proposed expedition; and
straightway commenced the fantastic pageant incident
to the setting out of a war-party at the commencement
of an Indian compaign; while MacDonald,
surveying the spectacle with a curious eye, was
not a little surprised to witness the almost childish
zeal with which Thayendanagea took his full
part in the savage mummery. A strange and bombastic
metamorphosis seemed to have come over
the reasoning companion with whom he had hitherto
been acquainted; so changed, indeed, did the
whole man seem within one brief hour, that the
wondering Scot could scarcely recognise in him
the person with whom he had lately walked conversing.

“This Mohawk,” said MacDonald, mentally,

“with all his talents and attainments, can never be
given as an instance of the capacity of his race for
civilization. The man seems to have two natures;
or, rather, the artificial character, produced by education,
is as distinct from his Indian nature as if it
belonged to another person. And if they do ever
mingle, it is only as I have sometimes seen the
blood of a European veining, without suffusing, the
cheek of a half-breed.”

This opinion of the shrewd Scotchman seems to
have been subsequently borne out by the singular
incongruities which characterized the career of the
remarkable person of whom it was pronounced; and
the historian of the times still hesitates in what
light to regard him who is described by many of
his contemporaries “as a mere cruel, coarse-minded
savage,” at the very time when the chief enjoyed
the friendship of some of the most chivalric
hearts, and could boast an intimate correspondence
with some of the most polished minds of Europe.

The sun had got low in the heavens by the time
the warriors were all arrayed for battle, and the important
task of putting on the war-paint concluded.
His level beams shot through the tree-tops on the
opposite shore, and glancing luridly upon the broad
stream that flowed in front of the Iroquois camp,
lighted up a grotesque array of forms and faces,
mirrored in every variety of attitude in the tranquil
river.

“Good!” said an Indian, who had just completed
his barbaric toilet, and still lingered, surveying the
result, with childish gratification, in the tide that
rolled at his feet, “very good; Squinandosh is a
great man. The Sacondaga is a happy stream, to
reflect a face so terrible as his. Go, river, and
bear his image in thy current while men tremble
along thy shores as they see it float by. Go, river,

and tell the great lake into which thou pourest,
that thou hast seen Squinandosh.”

“Who is greater than Kan-au-gou?” cried another,
rising with solemn gravity from the position
in which he had crouched, “the bravest of the men
who surpass all others. He paints not, he, to
make his features terrible, but to hide the countenance,
from which, if seen, his enemies would fly
so fast his bullets would never overtake them.”

“Behold, Au-neh-yesh! look well upon the tall
one,” said a third warrior, with the same Homeric
diffidence of self-praise. “It is the blood of
fifty white warriors that sprinkles his forehead. I
hear their widows and children howling after their
scalps, which shall dry in the smoke of his lodge;
but what hand shall ever reach up to the scalp of
him who walks with his head among the clouds?”

One youth, more sentimentally given, seemed to
regret only that there were no fair ones present to
yield their admiration to the gallant figure that he
made in his own eyes. Rejoicing in the possession
of a bit of broken looking-glass, this animated personage
paused ever and anon to elaborate his toilet
with some additional grace, as he strutted about
like a bantom cock, exclaiming: “Where are the
maids of the Mohawk, who love to look upon such
a man as `Le-petit-soldat?' Where is Tze-gwinda,
the fawn-eyed girl of the Unadilla, and she whose
feet move like a tripping brook, when the hawks-bells
tinkle around her slender ankles in the dance,
the laughing Ivalette? Where Waneka, of the
willowy form, and `Cherie,' whose eyes outsparkled
those of Ononthio's daughters at Montreal?
Where is she whose footfalls leave no print behind
them on the greensward or snowdrift; she who
steals upon men's hearts they know not whence or
how, where is `The Spreading Dew?' Let each of

them come, look upon `Le-petit-soldat,' and sigh to
be the squaw of such a warrior.”

“The Little Opossum is a great painter,” added
yet another of these heroic worthies; “none but a
medicine can find out his secret for mixing colours.
Owaneyo has not yet breathed in the nostrils of the
man that is meant to kill him. This island has but
one such warrior. Who but `The Little Opossum'
can kill `The Little Opossum?”'

As the night closed in they lighted their torches,
formed of the pitchy knots of the yellow pine; and
their barbaric boasting grew still more extravagant
as they tossed them wildly in the war-dance. But
here the demoniac forms, the distorted features, and
ferocious gesticulations, as they moved in savage
measure to the deep roll of the Indian drum, gave
at least a fiendish dignity to the scene in the eyes of
the European. It seemed as if the yawning earth
had released a troop of demons from below to practise
for a while their mad antics in the upper air;
and the Briton shuddered as he thought of such a
hellish crew being let loose to work their will upon
his rebellious countrymen.

There was a heavy rain during the night, and
many of these gallantly-apparelled warriors, who
slept in their war-dresses, looked sadly bedraggled,
after an hour's march through the dripping forest
the next morning; but their appearance was still
sufficiently formidable to awaken the admiration of
the martial Scotchman; and their military order,
their silence, and precision of movement, in obedience
to each command of their leader, when they
were once fairly started upon the war-path, struck
him as characterizing a race who were soldiers, both
by nature and education.

But among no martial people of whom history
preserves a record were there severer disciplinari

ans than among those semi-civilized tribes which
are known by the generic name of the Iroquois; a
stern and stoical people, whose peculiar institutions
and Spartan-like character—for their discipline extended
to all the relations of life—have been so ignorantly
confounded with the loose customs of the
more mercurial races, the mere barbaric tribes that
are still scattered over the northern and western
parts of this continent. Many, indeed, have denied
the superiority of the Six Nations over other
aboriginal races, and questioned the degree of civilization
which they had reached, because it was not
progressive; because the era of the Revolution
found them with the same social habits that are ascribed
to them by the earliest writers who make
mention of the Iroquois. But if that anomalous and
remarkable feature of the respect paid to women[2]
among them were wanting to confute this position,
how, it might be asked, how can that nation be
progressive in civilization which makes war the end
of all its efforts for improvement, instead of keeping
prepared for it merely as the means of preserving
the blessings of peace? which encourages agriculture,
and builds granaries, only for the supply of
armies, and explores the navigable waters of a vast
continent, not for the purposes of trade, but to secure
the transportation of those munitions which may enable
its forces to keep the field through a succession
of campaigns? Yet such was the policy which enabled
the Six Nations to carry their conquering
arms through every region that is now comprehended
in this wide-spread Union; and which made
them formidable, not only to the wild tribes far
west of the Mississippi, but to the Frenchman of
the St. Lawrence, the Englishman of the Chesapeake,
and the Spaniard of Mexico.

The Scottish soldier listened with thrilling interest
to the wild and warlike tales of distant forays,
as Thayendanagea beguiled the march by dwelling
upon the former glories of his people. Their religion
and laws were frequently the subject of his inquiries;
and, strange and uncouth as many of their
observances appeared to him, he had travelled too
widely over the earth to judge peculiar usages by
the narrow standard of his own national customs.
The partisans talked next of the civil war, whose
outbreak, so long threatening, seemed now at hand;
and the sagacious and comprehensive views of the
chieftain were not thrown away upon his experienced
companion, though more than once a strange
discord was struck in the bosom of the latter by the
ferocious sentiments that gleamed through the polished
language of his Indian comrade.

MacDonald, though a soldier of fortune, had never
been engaged in quite so disagreeable a business
before. For, though upon the same side with a majority
of his Catholic countrymen, yet there were
great numbers of Cameronian Scotch acting with
the Whigs; and, Jacobite as he was, he felt that
there was a difference between battling with an opposite
faction at Culloden and cutting the throats of
countrymen who, like himself, had come to find a
peaceful home in a strange land. This not unnatural
feeling of compunction was brought out more
strongly by a fierce reply which Brant made to
some observation of his about the relations of friendship
in which the chieftain had recently stood towards
those with whom he must now come in immediate
collision.

“And what,” said the Mohawk, “what are private
ties in times like these, when those of nations

are so rudely severed? Do you expect an Indian
to play the woman, when you white men have forgotten
all the claims of blood and kindred in this
strange quarrel with each other? If the wolf devour
his own whelps, why should the panther spare them,
merely because they are tenants of the same forest
with himself?”

But the night has again closed in around us, and
the prowling Indian has reached the fold he would
plunder.

7. CHAPTER VII.
THE RIFLING OF THE HAWKSNEST.

Dana.

The Farmer's Homestead, from which the estate
of Greyslaer took its name, lay upon the banks of
the Mohawk, immediately at the mouth of one of
those wooded gorges through which the tributaries
of the river descend from the mountains of Montgomery
to unite with the parent stream. The
broad, low-eaved mansion reposed in a rich alluvial
meadow, amid a clump of weeping elms; the luxuriancy
of whose foliage betrayed the neighbourhood
of the brook that watered their roots; and
which, descending impatiently amid the copses of
hazel and wild cherry, from the upland in the rear
of the house, glided slowly and noiselessly through
the green pastures, as if unwilling at the last to
merge its current into the broader stream beyond.

“Here,” said Thayendagea to his European
friend, when, having stationed his band in the underwood
that lined the sides of the gorge, he began to
move cautiously toward the house, accompanied
only by MacDonald; “here is the Hawksnest of
which I have spoken, and within an hour we will
clip the wings of the wildest of the falcon brood.”

The two royalists now approached the house with
the most stealthy caution, and by glancing from one

outbuilding to another, keeping always within their
shadow, they at last attained a position in which,
screened behind a trellice covered by gourds and
hop-vines, that sheltered the cottage-like porch, they
could easily look into the low windows of the mansion.

The scene thus witnessed brought so vividly to
mind the recollections of his early home, that the
British officer again shrunk from the stern task in
which he had consented to share. The window
opened into a large room wainscoted with black
walnut, whose dusky panels were relieved here
and there by the glimmer of a brass-mounted press,
or an antique beaufet with its attendant service of
painted china, and other furniture of European manufacture,
which had probably been brought from
his fatherland by the first owner of the dwelling.
There was no carpet upon the floor of the apartment,
which seemed to be a sort of hall, or common
sitting-room of the family, and a large ducking-gun
supported upon a magnificent pair of antlers
over the fireplace, with other appointments and
trophies of the chase, indicated the predominant
tastes of its customary male occupants.

But there were traces also of the presence of woman
in this rural household, in the framed needle-work
that adorned the walls, the vase of freshly-gathered
flowers upon the mantelpiece, and, above all, in the
general air of neatness that pervaded its simple arrangements.
Nor did MacDonald long doubt to
whom these slight but indubitable evidences of feminine
taste were owing, when he gazed upon the occupants
of the apartment. These were an aged man
and his two daughters. A white-haired patriarch,
who sat a little aloof from the table, at which a slight-made,
invalid-looking girl was seated, reading aloud,
while the other, a dark-eyed, luxuriant beauty, stood

reeling some coloured worsted from the back of a
chair. The glow of health, the purple light of youth,
the pride of rich, resistless womanhood, seemed all
mantling in the cheek and animating the person of
the latter; and when the European gazed upon her
haughty, intellectual brow, her mouth, whose ripe
and melting softness was still redeemed from all
weakness of expression by something wayward
and aspiring even in its smiles; when glancing
from her white and exquisitely turned shoulders,
just touched by the light which polished her velvet
bodice, he looked to the noble contour of her person,
brought out as it was by the position in which
she stood, with one fairy foot upraised upon the
lower rung of the chair before her, the portrait of
more than one proud dame of princely courts rose
freshly radiant to his view; while the pale, passionless-looking
girl, upon whom the old father gazed
with eyes of such affectionate interest, seemed the
far fitter tenant of an abode so obscure.

“It is, indeed, a cruel duty, Sachem, to disturb
such a home as that,” he whispered to his companion.

“Yes, but still it is a duty,” muttered the Indian,
sternly.

“And yet not necessarily ours to-night; the
young man whom you seek is evidently not at
home; for see, now, the tall girl has laid aside her
work; they are preparing for family prayers, yet
Greyslaer is still absent.”

“Speak lower,” said Brant, in a suppressed tone,
which sounded like the hissing of a serpent in the
ear of the other; “that tall girl could wield the souls
of a hundred rebels with her eyes! She must be
placed out of the way till these fanatic boys of
the same traitorous household recover their senses.
Nay! murmur not at this decision; a hair of her
head shall not be injured. But, hist, what noise is

that?” he added, turning round as he retired a few
paces from the trellice, which interposed its leafy
curtain between him and the window.

“It is only some of your followers; you told them
to approach for the seizure, the moment that the rising
moon should cast her first beam above you
clump of maples.”

“Yes, but she yet lacks a hand's breadth of gaining
the top of the sugar-bush, and that tramp is
never made by an Indian moccasin.”

As the chieftain spoke, the sharp crack of a rifle,
followed instantly by the wild whoop of Indian war-fare,
rang out on the night air, while a young warrior,
whose approach had been hitherto unobserved
by Thayendanagea himself, stood suddenly before
them.

“A party of Corlaer's fighting men! but we out-number
them. Our warriors sent me to ask leave
to fight, but the foe has stirred their covert before
the message could reach my father.”

“And where was Au-neh-yesh, not to know of
their approach?” fiercely asked the chief of his son,
in their own language.

“Au-neh-yesh watched upon the hills above the
waterfall; Kan-au-gou in the fields below. The
sons of Corlaer came up the bed of the running water,
and Kan-au-gou must have mistaken the plashing
of footsteps on one side for the ripple of waters
on the other.”

“It is well; let our people stand fast till they
hear my signal from the hill behind them, and then
disperse as best they may.”

The chieftain spoke, and Au-neh-yesh disappeared
on the instant. “And now, Captain MacDonald,”
said Brant, “we have not a moment to lose
in securing our captive, while my young men keep
the rebels at bay. Nay, I pledge myself to the girl's

safety,” he added, with a jesture of impatience, observing
still symptoms of reluctance in his coadjutor.

But the feat, so often afterward, during the war,
accomplished by Brant with such consummate address,
was fated, in the present instance, to a more
serious result than could have been anticipated.

Of the different parties of Whigs, who, according
to previous concert, were to rendezvous at the
Hawksnest this evening, that of Greyslaer was the
only one which, for reasons that will be hereafter
mentioned moved to the proposed conference.
It was well that the band was better armed and better
ordered than were most yeomanry corps at the
commencement of our civil struggle, and that they
were commanded by one who, on this night, gave
as signal proofs of his quickness of resource and
ability as a partisan soldier, as he had formerly
shown evidence of high moral courage upon the occasions
we have already noticed. The twenty-four
hours which had elapsed since his deliverance from
the myrmidons of Sir John Johnson, Greyslaer knew
afforded sufficient time for that vigilant loyalist to
obtain information of the proceedings of the patriot
party, and to adopt measures to prevent the proposed
meeting. This, in the excited state of popular
feeling, could scarcely be effected by an open
exercise of his authority as a magistrate. A stroke
of address in seizing the rebel ringleaders, or the
cutting off the different parties in detail, by way-laying
them on their approach to the rendezvous,
seemed the only movement that could serve his purpose.
Fearful, therefore, of an ambuscade, Greyslaer
had exercised the greatest caution in approaching
the scene of danger.

Marching warily along the banks of the river, until
he came within half a mile of his destination, he

had turned aside upon reaching the mouth of the
tributary before mentioned; and, making the bed of
the smaller stream his highway, had struck inland
towards the hill, so as, by a serpentine course, to
approach the house from the rear. These precautions,
however, would only have served to throw
him into the midst of Brant's party, which, intent
upon the operation which had brought their chief to
the spot, lay concealed upon the banks of the brook
where it first descended to the lowlands, if the military
foresight of the young partisan had not added
another safeguard to his march by throwing out a
picket upon either side of the stream.

The worthy Balt, who chanced to be one of the
two persons detailed upon this duty, used always to
quote his deeds of this night in illustration of a favourite
assertion of his, that a true woodsman always
knew, by instinct, when an Indian was within fifty
yards of him. Certain it is, that he had not proceeded
in advance of his comrades a hundred yards
up the stream, when a faint whistle, like that of a
woodcock settling in a cornfield when a summer
shower has lured him from his favourite morass,
caused an instant halt of his party. The call was
answered by an Indian, who, rising slowly from a
brake, showed his shaven crown, for a moment, in
the moonlight, and then slunk back to his cover, as
if having, for the instant, mistaken the call of a real
bird for the signal of some comrade come to relieve
him at his post.

Some three minutes were now passed by Greyslaer's
party in breathless attention for another signal.
These were so skilfully employed by the
woodsman in gliding towards his foe, that they
measured the mortal existence of the unhappy Indian.
A short and desperate struggle, a smothered
cry, and the crashing of branches, as a heavy body

rolled through the thicket into the water, finished
the career of the warrior Kan-au-gou.

“Thank your stars, boys, that your lives are not
trusted to such a stupid lout as that,” whispered
Balt, joining his party the next instant. “Capting,
that chap was painted for a war-party, and you may
depend there is more vermilion in the neighbourhood.
The red devils must be beyond the rifts
upon the hill above us; God knows how many of
'em; but the best thing we can do is to change our
course, and strike straight through the fields to the
homestead, where we can stand a siege, if the worst
come to the worst.”

Greyslaer nodded approval, and instantly gave the
necessary order; while his men silently deployed
from the bed of the stream, and ascended the bank,
preparatory to making a swift movement across the
meadows to the house. Two fields, separated by a
high rail-fence, laid “worm-fashion,” intervened between
them and the homestead, and it was the sound
of their feet, in running across the first field, which
caught the quick ear of Thayendanagea, and in the
same moment alarmed his ambushed followers.
Au-neh-yesh, by the order of one of the chiefs, had
bounded off, on the instant, to communicate with the
Sachem, and had nearly reached the house, when,
casting his eyes behind him, he beheld Greyslaer's
party in the act of surmounting the division-fence
we have mentioned. Without waiting to select his
man, he instantly fired upon them, and the shot produced
at once the effect intended by the keen-witted
savage. The whites, finding themselves thus attacked
in the direction of the house, deemed that it
was already in possession of the enemy. They faltered
in their advance, and then, as a tumultuous
yell burst from the thickets on their flank, they
formed in the angles of the serpentine fence, as the

nearest cover at hand, and poured their fire upon the
advancing foe. The Mohawks recoiled on the instant,
and both parties lay now protected by their
cover, with a broad strip of moonlit meadow between
them, into which both were afraid to venture,
contenting themselves with keeping up a dropping
fire upon each other, as the gleam of weapons betrayed
here and there an object to aim at.

The situation of Greyslaer's party seemed now
precarious in the extreme.

“The Redskins are surrounding us, captain,” said
one of the brave but undisciplined yeomanry. “We
had better back out by crawling, in the shadow of
the fence, to the bushes on the river-side in our
rear.”

“Rayther,” said another, “let us go ahead, and
make a clean thing of it, by charging through the
varmint in front, and gain the heavy timber in their
rear.”

“Now my say is, boys,” quoth Balt, “just to do
neither one or t'other.”

“What, then, do you counsel, Balt? for we cannot
long maintain ourselves where we lie, if the Indians
are in any strength,” said Greyslaer.

“Why, the bizness is a bad one, anyhow you can
fix it, capting; but I think I understand the caper
on't. Don't you see—sarve you right, Bill; I told
you they'd spile that hat afore the night was over, if
you would pop up your head above the rider instead
of firing atween the rails—don't you see that we've
only had one shot from the house, while the old
fence is already pretty well riddled from the hillside?
Well—elevate a little lower, Adam, if it's that
skulking fellow by the big elm you're trying for—
well, then, as I was saying, it's pretty easy to guess
where the strength of the redskins must lie; and I
don't see that we can do better than streak it right

ahead for the house, and trust to legs and luck for
getting safe into it.”

The suggestion was too much in accordance with
Greyslaer's feelings not to be eagerly caught at by
him. Indeed, so overpowering was his anxiety for
the beloved inmates of the mansion, that nothing but
considerations of duty toward the party who had
trusted themselves to his guidance, had hitherto
prevented him from dashing forward to his destination
at all hazards. But if he had still hesitated as
to the course to adopt in the present exigency, all
doubt as to his movements was at once dispelled in
the moment that Balt finished speaking.

A sound of terror, the shriek of woman in distress,
with the hoarse cry of age imploring mercy
and assistance, rose suddenly from the dwelling,
chilling the blood of some, and making the pulses
of others leap with mad and vengeful impatience.
And it was then that, bursting simultaneously from
their cover, the red man and the white could be
seen urging their way with rival fleetness towards
the same goal, for the moment apparently regardless
of each other's neighbourhood; pausing not to strike
down a competitor in the race, but striving only who
first could reach the bourne. The one thirsting to
share in the massacre that seemed in the act of perpetration;
the other burning with fierce impatience
to arrest or avenge the butchery of his friends.

A light and agile youth, a fair-haired boy of sixteen,
was the first that gained the door of the mansion;
but even as he planted his foot upon the
threshold, his head was cloven asunder by an Indian
tomahawk, and, with limbs quivering in death,
his body rolled down the steps, while the exulting
savage who dealt the blow leaped over it brandishing
his fatal weapon. But his triumph was short.
Greyslaer was close upon him, and, as he strained

every nerve in rushing forward, he came with his
drawn rapier so impetuously upon the Indian, that
the point was driven through his back deep into the
panel of the door, which burst open from the shock.

Leaving his friends for the moment to make good
their entrance as best they could, by opposing their
hunting-knives and clubbed rifles to the tomahawks
and maces of the Indians, who instantly mingled
with them in wild melée around the porch, Greyslaer
rushed forward to the sitting-room of the family.
He shrunk aghast at the sight of horror which told
him that he had come too late. The master of the
house lay stunned and senseless upon the floor.
Alida, the beautiful Alida, had disappeared; but her
fair-haired sister lay weltering in her blood, while a
gash across her forehead, with the tangled locks
drawn backward from her brow and the print of
gory fingers fresh upon the golden tissue, called
Greyslaer's eye to a savage, who shook his scalping-knife
at him with a hideous grin of disappointed
malice as he sprang through the open window.
But there was no time now for grief to have its
way. The din of the conflict still rose fresh behind
him, and Greyslaer turned to the succour of his
friends whom it might avail.

“Powder, powder, capting!” shouted Balt, who
this moment presented himself. “There's a big
redskin keeping three of our men at bay with his
tomahawk; I must use him up at once, to give the
rest an opportunity of making a rush from the out-house;
our best men are still outside. Bedlow
and Boonhoven are both down; but big Hans, the
miller, yet holds the door stoutly, and Bill Stacey
has gone up with his axe to drop the gutter from
the eaves upon the redskins that are hammering at
the windows. Ah! there's the tool for my purpose,”
he added, seizing the ducking gun from the chimney,

and throwing down his half-loaded rifle; while
Greyslaer had, in the mean time, secured the window
through which the ferocious Au-neh-yesh had a moment
before made his entrance and escape.

Greyslaer now rushed to support the man who
was holding the door against odds so stoutly; while
Balt ascended the staircase, freshly priming the
ducking gun, and adding a handful of buckshot to
the already heavily charged piece as he went. He
gained a window in the same moment that Greyslaer,
sallying out from the house sword in hand,
cut down the sturdy warrior for whom Balt had
prepared his charge. A dozen Mohawks instantly
rushed forward to avenge the fall of their comrade.
But the heavy piece of Balt did good service in the
moment, or Greyslaer's career would have been cut
short for ever. A shower of buckshot drove them
quickly to regain their cover.

“Now, boys,” shouted the woodsman, “make a
rush for the house, while the red devils digest that
peppering.”

The handful of outlying whites did not wait for
the invitation to be repeated, but rushed pellmell
within the porch so furiously as to bear down each
other in the hall, while the sturdy miller made a
liberal use of his foot in pushing aside their bodies
while shutting the heavy oaken door.

Furious at being thus foiled, the brave Mohawks
made a simultaneous rush towards the entrance,
when, at that instant, the rude and ponderous gutter,
loosened from the eaves, descended with a crash
upon their heads; and, with a wild howl of grief
and dismay, the survivers of their party drew off
their wounded and disabled comrades, and left the
stout yeomen masters of the field.

8. CHAPTER VIII.
THE RUINED HOMESTEAD.

Yamoyden.

The human heart has no more bitter grief than
that which springs from the recollection of unkindness
toward those who, loving us when living, are
now, by the barriers of the grave, placed for ever beyond
the reach of our remorseful recollection.
But love—whether it be the love of kindred, or the
wilder, warmer passion, that more generally bears
that name—is ever humble and self-chiding when
absent from its object. The heart then forgets the
frailties that may at times have shaken its esteem;
it softens in degree the faults which have so severely
tried its regard, that it cannot but remember
them; it pardons every offending quality, that may
often have tasked its forbearance, and threatened
even the continuance of its tenderness; it imputes
to itself all the blame that it has ever attached to the
beloved object; and finds an excuse for each caprice
of the one who may have trifled with it, in its own
unworthiness, to inspire true affection.

It was not unnatural, therefore, that the young
Greyslaer, when he surveyed the desolation that
had come over the home of Alida, and thought of
her as torn from that home, a captive, dependant
upon the mercies of the half-civilized Mohawk—it
was not unnatural that, while every humane and

generous impulse of his heart should be called into
action, the more subtile emotions of latent tenderness
should also quicken afresh in his bosom.

“She loved me not, she never would have loved
me,” said the youth, mournfully; “yet, God knows,
I would have laid down my life for her. Yes,
coldly as she received me the last time I crossed
this threshold, and forbidding as I for months have
found her whene'er we met, I would give worlds
for one haughty and impatient glance, checking my
ill-timed assiduities, could she but now sit there in
safety to receive them. So noble, so gifted, so gentle,
to be torn thus—gentle? No, Alida, the word
befits not thy proud and aspiring nature! Yet why
should I hold her high spirit in reproach, because
I may at times have chafed at its imperiousness,
and thought that it looked too insolently down upon
such a thing as I am? What am I, that I should
aspire to the love of such a being? What guerdon
have I won from glory, what deed of nobleness have
I achieved, that I may aspire to mate myself with
one whose queen-like step should be upon the neck
of emperors?”

And the young man strode to and fro across the
apartment with disordered pace and gesticulations
that became the extravagance of his language; while
desperate resolves and bitter self-reproaches were
so wildly mingled in his speech, that one who had
never before witnessed the fantastic mood of a lover,
would have deemed that, if not the immediate
instrument of the calamity that had overtaken his
mistress, yet the preferring of his unwelcome suit
must be in some way the cause of her disastrous
fortunes. But when was there a lover who was not
an egotist, or who did not believe that the dream
which wraps his senses must somehow shape the
destiny of her who inspires the infatuation; who can

be made to think that the current of his feelings, like
the ocean tides, may reflect the image without influencing
the actions of their mistress? But Greyslaer,
though the first burst of feeling will ever have
its way in one so young in years and new to sorrow,
was not a man to waste the moments that were precious,
in a lover's idle rhapsodies; nor, indeed, had
he given way to even this transient weakness, until
he had done all that could be at present accomplished
for the distressed household.

The bereaved father, when first brought to his
senses, and enabled to recall his share in the events
of the night, left little doubt, by his testimony, as to
the disposal that had been made of Alida. But the
narration was so loose and unconnected, as wrung
piecemeal from the broken-hearted old man, that we
have ventured to enlarge and connect his relation,
in order to make it intelligible to the reader.

The shot and shout which heralded the conflict
had struck dismay into the family engaged in the
peaceful avocations we have described at the opening
of the last chapter. The invalid girl had the
moment before laid aside the book which she had
been engaged in reading aloud; and her sister, taking
a Bible from the chimneypiece, handed it to her father
to close the evening with the customary religious
service before retiring.

“It would be provoking,” remarked Alida, while
opening the good book on the table before him, “if
some of Derrick's rough comrades should not have
heard that the night of the rendezvous was changed,
and come and rouse us an hour hence from our
slumbers! There's one gallant I wot of, Tyntie,”
added she, passing her hand archly over the head
of her sister, “who would not be sorry for the
omission, if it but gave him an excuse for showing
his new uniform at Hawksnest.”

“Pshaw, sister, you know that young Harper is
no more to me than any other young man of the
valley that comes to our house. But I am sure that
to-night I should be glad to see him or any of the
bold friends that Dirk has collected around us in
these stormy times. Brave as you are, I don't believe
you would have been sorry if, instead of the
boy they sent with the note, wise Max Greyslaer
had been the bearer of it.”

“The striplings are alike to me,” said Alida, without
noticing the faint smile of the invalid. “As for
Greyslaer, he had to go south to the Reinhollow
Settlement to get his friends together; and they
would have eaten us out of house and home, if we
had to keep his hungry hunters over the morrow.
But, silly one, think you that, if there were danger,
Derrick would have kept aloof himself? Father, let
me look again at his note! See, there's nothing to
alarm us here,” pursued she, reading the missive
aloud:

“We shall not disturb the repose of your house
to-night, my dear father, as the proposed meeting of
the friends of the king and constitution is deferred.
The ministerial malignants are abroad. Johnson,
indeed, still lies, with all his power, at the hall; but
his tool, Joseph Brant, has got together some vagabond
Mohawks at the north, and has prepared to
move to-morrow towards the river. He claims
that he and his miscreant followers represent the
sentiments of the whole Six Nations; and we are
going westward to intercept his march, and seize
his person, before he can communicate with the
other Indians and work us farther mischief. I always
told you, honoured sir, that this precious specimen
of the civilized savage would go with the
British ministers in their tyrannical attempts to enslave

us, and I will make your quondam friend confess
as much before to-morrow night, if—”

The sudden report of firearms, followed immediately
by the appalling war-whoop, broke off the
farther reading of the note, and struck dismay into
the defenceless household. The timid Tyntie,
pressing her hands to her temples, as if to shut out
the fearful sounds, bent her head down to the table,
cowering like a frightened bird, hopeless of escape
when the fowler is upon her. The old man clasped
his hands, and uplifted his aged and prayerful countenance
with a look of mute but anxious pleading.
Alida only, of the three, seemed to retain the power
of action. Pushing the table impatiently from her,
she stood, for a moment, with flashing eye and dilated
form, and senses all alert, as if, Penthisalea-like,
the sounds of approaching combat were music to
her soul. Then, as the turmoil of the strife rose
nearer and clearer, she cast a hurried look of anxiety
at the helpless beings by her side, and rushed
to a window to gain intelligence of the extent of the
danger.

It was the same window beside which Brant and
his Scottish accomplice had planted themselves;
and, as impetuously throwing up the sash, she leaned
far out to catch a view of the grounds beyond the
end of the house, the sinewy arm of the chieftain
encircled her waist in a moment, and, incapacitated
from resistance alike by surprise and the position
in which she stood, she was lifted from her feet by
a power that was equally rapid and resistless, and
placed in the arms of MacDonald, who, moved but
not melted by her shrieks, hurried from the spot
with his captive. As for Brant, he had only delayed
for a moment to pinion her arms by securing the
ends of his knotted baldrick, which, unobserved by
MacDonald, he had thrown over her shoulders in

the moment he seized her person, and then he
bounded through the open window into the apartment.

“Joseph Brant!” cried the old man, raising the
palms of his hands like one startled by an apparition,
and averting his head as if to shut out the conviction
of the character in which his former neighbour
now presented himself. “Joseph Brant, my
enemy!”

“Thayendanagea, your ancient friend,” replied
the chief, advancing with outstretched hand.

“Off, off, perfidious and ruthless villain. If a father's
vengeance could renew the strength in these
withered limbs, you durst not—”

“By the eternal spirit of Truth above us, not a
hair of your daughter's head, old man, shall come to
harm. 'Twas but to prove to you Alida's safety in
the hands of Thayendanagea that I have betrayed
my share in this night's business; for that, and to
assure you of your own, is all—”

“Yes, as the hound protects the hind from the
knife of the hunter, when he has driven her into his
hands. Off, dog of an Indian, off, wretched mercenary;
or, if your power to save be equal to your
will to slay, protect yourself at this moment.” And
seizing a tall andiron from the fireplace, he brandished
aloft his awkward weapon, and rushed upon
the chieftain. Phrensied with passion, the feeble
old man had summoned all his remaining energy to
deal a single blow at the spoiler of his household;
and as Brant leaped lightly aside from the descending
blow, he fell forward, striking his hoary brow
with stunning effect against the iron instrument,
which came between his head and the floor. At this
moment, Alida, escaping from the care of MacDonald,
presented herself at the window, with the Indian
Au-neh-yesh in close pursuit behind her. The

ferocious young savage had already raised his tomahawk
to strike, and it was only the menacing cry
of his chieftain and father which saved the life of
the maid. A few hurried words from him told
Brant that there was now no time to be lost, if he
would secure the only prey yet in his power. He
tore the shrieking girl from the window-sill, to
which she clung; and lifting her like a child in his
arms, rushed, through the garden and up the wooded
hill in the rear of the house.

The young Mohawk turned to bear back the
command of his Sachem to his party, but catching
a glimpse of Tyntie's prostrate form, who still lay
lost in the swoon into which the first alarm had
thrown her, he could not resist his ferocious propensities,
while the tumult of the strife, which at
this moment rose nearer and nearer, urged their
gratification. He sprang forward, buried his tomahawk
in her brain, and, twisting his fingers in her
long tresses, had already drawn the scalping knife
from his girdle, when Greyslaer's sudden appearance
compelled him to seek safety in flight.

The other incidents of the assault have been already
detailed to the reader in the previous chapter.
The note we have mentioned, which still lay
open upon the table, for the first time acquainted
Grayslaer with the altered intentions of his friends.
But, under existing circumstances, he determined
to remain at the Hawksnest, and await their coming
on the following day. An attempt to rescue Alida
with his present handful of men would, he soon
acknowledged, be worse than vain; but he did not
abandon the idea, until, by a close examination of
the ground, he had made a tolerably accurate estimation
of the number of followers Brant had with
him, and his means of securing an escape to the
upper country. He was even able to trace the foot-steeps

of Alida herself in several places. But a
dog belonging to the household, which had been
unchained to assist in the examination, and had
proved himself eminently useful in striking the Indian
trail in the first instance, and shown his sagacious
sympathy in their search by uttering a sharp
howl when they first lighted upon the traces of his
mistress, disappeared soon afterward amid the darkness
of the forest, and the use of the lanterns in
groping about added nothing farther to their discoveries
when the aid of the animal was withdrawn.

In the mean time, the patriot party took every
precaution to secure themselves against a surprise
during the night. The windows of the house were
strongly barricaded, sentinels were posted, and a
shed, with other slight outbuildings, which might
cover the approach of an enemy, were levelled with
the ground. The body of the unfortunate Tyntie
was consigned to the care of a couple of female
slaves, whose vociferous grief over the gory remains
of their young mistress almost drowned the
deep mourning of her stricken-hearted father, who
had to be forcibly torn from the body and carried
off to another chamber.

After a night made tedious by broken slumbers
and harassing dreams, confusedly alternating each
other, it was with no slight feeling of relief that
Greyslaer hailed the approach of dawn. The summer
landscape wore a Sabbath-like stillness, as
he gazed upon it from his open window, while inhaling
the fresh breeze of morning. The mist-wreaths
curling up from the river were the only objects
moving, and even these stole off as gently as
if fearful of breaking the silence by a more rapid
motion; creeping now around some imbowered
islet, pausing now to twine for a moment amid the
leafy festoons of vines and branching elms upon

some jutting promontory, and now circling the brow
of one of those cliffs whose craggy and frowning
summits give its only feature of sternness to the
soft and lovely vale of the Mohawk, and at once
dignify and diversify its exquisite landscape.

The heart of the young patriot bled to think that
a scene so fair and smiling must be given up to the
cruel ravages of war. Of a war too, which, while
presenting itself in the worst form of that scourge
of humanity, brought with it the threatening horrors
of many a savage massacre, superadded to the
dire calamity of armed discord among those who
call themselves civilized.

“And what,” thought Greyslaer, “what are the
private griefs of one solitary being like myself, to
the sorrows of the thousands whose fate is wound
up in this impending struggle; what weighs the
present doom of all of us, when balanced in the
scales of Omniscient Benevolence, against the welfare
of the millions yet unborn, whose destiny hangs
upon the success of our endeavour. God of Heaven!
but it is a gallant game, a noble stake we play
for. But those that come after us! will they prize
it when won, will they cherish the glorious guerdon,
and remember the deeds and the men who made it
theirs? Will they love each rood and inch of their
blood-bought patrimony, where every acre that was
sown with the dragon teeth of despotism produced
its hero? Will they too rear a race of men, fit to
be the second crop of a soil so generous? Will the
free-born dames of those days, will the mothers
that tutor them—alas! if their mothers were to be
such as thee, Alida, who could doubt their high-souled
nurture!” But the thoughts of the youthful
Greyslaer became less coherent, as they assumed a
softer character, nor need we follow the reflections

of the ardent young patriot, as they became merged
in the vague musing of the less sanguine lover.

As the day wore on, and the hour of the expected
return of the younger De Roos to his father's
house drew nigh, Greyslaer shrunk from witnessing
the harrowing impression which the desolate household
must make upon his friend. Derrick came
not, however, in the manner that was painfully anticipated
by those who dreaded the shock of surprise
that seemed to await him. Ill news flies fast,
and the story of his ruined homestead was soon
spread over the country; and when the young De
Roos, returning from his bootless quest of Brant,
first fell in with his friends and neighbours flocking
to the scene of disaster, he soon learned the dark
story from the agitated females, who were hurrying,
in company with their fathers and brothers, toward
the Hawksnest. Leaving another to take charge
of his own immediate party, the horror-stricken
young man threw himself on a fresh horse that was
proffered by a kinsman, and, striking the spurs into
his flanks, dashed furiously forward.

“Where is she? Where are their bodies?” he
exclaimed, foaming with impatience as he leaped
from the saddle and rushed into the house, as if
the mad energy of his grief could even yet rekindle
life in the bosoms of the dead.

“My son, my son!” cried the old man, moving a
step toward Derrick, then tottering, and sinking
helpless into the chair from which he had risen.

“My father!” screamed the youth, in a wild tone
of delight and grief, most strangely mingled. “And
did the wretches then spare your gray hairs; are
all, then, not gone?”

“All! look there, look there, Derrick! They left
my aged blood to chill in my veins through time, if
horror might not curdle it; but those young pulses

have ceased to beat for ever.” And the frame of the
youth trembled like that of a woman as his father
pointed to the narrow cot where, stark and stiff, but
still composed, in the decent attire of a Christian
grave, reposed the remains of Tyntie, his younger
sister. His features were as pale as those of the
corpse as he advanced to its side and raised the napkin
which covered the face. He started. “What,
Tyntie, my poor, my gentle girl! And was thy
delicate thread of life, that might have snapped so
easily—so nearly worn, too, that any moment might
have severed it—was that frail thread thus rudely
riven asunder?” He spoke mournfully, but there
was no bitterness in his grief; and nascent hope
and burning anxiety were depicted in his countenance
as he turned hastily to his father, in a hoarse
and tremulous whisper:

“Alida—Alida, my father?” His agitation was
too great to utter more.

“She was borne off by the villain Brant, unharmed
as we think and trust,” said Greyslaer, advancing.
“I waited but your arrival, Derrick, to reinforce my
rifles and start in pursuit.”

A complete reaction now took place in the feelings
of the mercurial young De Roos. Rumour,
who flies on magic wings, generally, too, exercises
a magical power in exaggerating the tidings that she
bears. The dismayed youth had heard in the first
instance of the total destruction of his house; indeed,
there had been tales of burnings as well as massacres;
and when he rode so furiously homeward, it
was not until he beheld the quiet smoke ascending
from the hall of his infancy that he hoped even to
recover the bodies of his kindred for Christian burial.
To find his father living, and Alida, his favourite
sister, his pride and his delight, still not numbered
with the dead, wrought such a change in his

mind, that every object around him wore a new aspect.
The world, which a few moments before
seemed so drear and gloomy, that the very idea of
drawing out his desolate existence for an hour was
accompanied by that suffocating sense of pain intolerable,
that most men, perhaps, have sometimes
known—the world, the young and half-tried world
around him, seemed now almost as fresh and fair
as ever. With buoyant step he hurried out to meet
his approaching friends, and, as the wagons of the
gathering yeomanry drove into the courtyard, it
would have seemed, from the congratulations that
passed among the females, whom sympathy or curiosity
had brought to the house of mourning, that
every cause of grief were for the moment removed.

All the particulars relating to the last hours of the
young girl, who thus far had been the chief sufferer
by these events, were now told over and over,
amid frequent exclamations among the females,
while the incidents of the flight were recounted
with not less animation by the men who participated
in it, as they clustered around some mounted
rangers, who, being among the new-comers, were
now engaged in grooming their horses at the stable.
The fate of the brave fellows who had fallen, and
who, few in number, chanced to be mere hangers-on
of the community, with no near kindred to lament
them, was by their acquaintances and comrades
sincerely deplored. As the evening drew on,
many of the party dispersed, some to seek a supper
and bed with the nearest neighbours, none of whom
dwelt within a mile of the Hawksnest; and others
to seek a berth for the night in the barn or some
other outbuilding, where they might be ready for
attendance upon the funeral on the morrow. Greyslaer,
in the mean time, having taken counsel with

the friends of Alida's family, it was agreed that he
and Derrick should leave the care of the ceremonial
to a near kinsman of the latter, while, selecting a
chosen party of followers, they should set out together
an hour after midnight to follow up the trail
of Brant.

9. CHAPTER IX.
DEATH'S DOINGS.

Bryant.

It was through the lenity of MacDonald, in releasing
the bonds of his captive the moment he discovered
her arms were pinioned, that Alida had
succeeded in making her single attempt at escape,
which we have already seen was futile. The worthy
Scotchman was deeply chagrined at having in
any way participated in the business of the night,
which he deemed affected his character both as an
officer and as a gentleman; and now, while hurrying
toward the Indian station, he did not hesitate to
express his regret that the lady had not succeeded
in regaining the protection of her friends. Thayendanagea
seemed in no wise offended with the bluntness
of his language, as the major denounced in no
measured terms the Indian system of making war
upon women and children, answering only very dryly
that that was a question for the moralist, which he
would be happy to discuss with his friend when
they should be at leisure to talk over the whole
subject of war, with Sir John's chaplain to make a
third party in the discussion. “But, Major MacDonald,”
said he, “I could tell you that in regard to
the position of this young lady which entirely prevents

her case from being included in the question
you have raised.”

“You have already told me the considerations of
policy which prompted the act; but, Sachem, there
is but one policy which should ever govern gallant
men when the welfare of women is concerned. Our
humane civilization teaches us that war—”

“Is an honourable game, at which the noble and
the far-descended should play with the lavished
lives of their inferiors, the wail of whose desolated
kindred can never reach the ears of the upper
classes, to whom alone the prize of glory in any
event may fall; pardon my interruption, but that,
Major MacDonald, is the real purport of what you
would say. You would shudder at the bare thought
of one of England's high-born dames being torn from
her luxurious home to a prisoner's dungeon; and the
horror of her being tortured at the stake would
darken the recollection of the most brilliant successes
in war. But the wretched children, whom you
doom to grow up in poverty and contempt by making
them fatherless; the lacerated hearts of thousands
of widows, whose existence you protract by
your reluctant bounty, after rendering that existence
miserable; these are never remembered to cast a
shade over the tale of a victory. Call you this humanity,
which embraces but the welfare of a class
within its mercies? Call you this consideration for
woman, which regards the rank rather than the sex
of the sufferers? The sex? Great Spirit of the
universe! have I not read of your gallantry, your
tender mercies toward them in the storming of
towns and castles? I, an Indian, a savage, have
seen your own records, the white man's printed testimony
to these abominations of his race; but the
breath of life is not in the nostrils of him who has
seen a female insulted by her Iroquois captor.”

MacDonald listened to the tirade of the chieftain
without caring to contradict what he said; and, by
way of cutting short the discussion, and changing
the subject to one of a less abstract nature, he admitted
that if war were an evil, not the least summary
way of putting an end to it was by the Indian
mode of making all who were interested in its result
indiscriminate sharers in its horrors. “But I
have yet to learn, Sachem,” said he, “why the welfare
of this young lady is not involved in the question?”

Brant smiled grimly, and pointed to a litter of
boughs carried by a couple of Indians, whereon reposed
the form of Alida, wrapped in his own mantle.
“Could a father,” he said, “care more gently
for his own daughter than do I for the Lady Alida?
Could that feeble old man, with his rash, hot-headed
son, have given her the safe shelter she may
find, in times like these, beneath the roof of Thayendanagea?
The devil is unchained, I tell ye, Major
MacDonald, and there are wild men enough
beside Indians to do his bidding in these parts.”

“Why,” said MacDonald, in a tone of surprise
and pleasure, “why did you not hint this to me
before? You spoke but of taking the lady as an
hostage! Had I thought that so generous a concern
prompted—”

“Nay, speak not of generosity. Perhaps, after
all—though her safety is best secured by the act—it
was but as an hostage that I did seize my captive.
But I mean her as an hostage to restrain far more
dangerous spirits than the mad-cap De Roos, or the
dreaming enthusiast Greyslaer. There are men—
men bearing the commission of the king, who bring
the ferocious nature of outlaws to our cause; men
whom you and I would scorn to act with, save in a
cause so holy; and in the mad dance of devilish passions

which the convulsion of the times will let loose,
they must be restrained by other powers than those
of official authority. There is one man who—but
this is not the time to speak of him; let us urge onward
to our destination.”

That time never came with Brant, who seemed
to have forgotten the promised solution of his dark
and mysterious language when they arrived at the
Indian station; nor did MacDonald, who soon after
departed with an escort through the woods to Johnstown,
understand, till long afterward, the bearing of
what the chieftain said upon events disclosed in the
sequel; and which may be best unfolded in the
regular course of our story, which recurs again to
the scene of our last chapter.

It was about the hour of midnight that the younger
De Roos, taking Balt to guide him upon the Indian
track, quietly withdrew to the hillside with his
followers; where, after some ten minutes' impatient
waiting for Greyslaer, they took up their line of
march through the forest without him.

Greyslaer, in the mean time, rising from the pallet
whereon he had snatched a brief repose, descended
the staircase, and already had his hand on
the outer door, when a deep moaning in the room
adjacent to the passage arrested his attention. A
feeble light streaming through an aperture showed
that the door was ajar, and, with cautious and subdued
steps, he hesitated not to enter.

It was the chamber of the dead.

The flickering taper upon the hearth revealed the
figure of an old woman in a gray cloak, whose attenuated
and sallow features looked still more ghastly
from the scarlet hood which was thrown back
from her forehead and rested upon her shoulders.
She sat upon a low wicker chair, with one of her
feet upon a footstool, and the other with the toe

stiffly upturned, and the heel resting on the floor,
thrust out so far beyond her dress that its shrivelled
proportions showed like the stark limb of a skeleton.
Her cheek supported upon her bony fingers, with
the closed lids of her sunken eyes, showed that her
vigil had been badly kept; and Greyslaer, pained at
the thought that the remains of the gentle Tyntie
should be left to such a watcher, turned from the
forlorn old crone to the coffin in which the body had
been laid.

It was empty. But, before he could rally his
thoughts to account for a circumstance so astounding,
the moaning sounds which had first drawn him
to the chamber again caught his ear. He turned,
and beheld a sight both piteous and awful.

In a shadowy corner of the room, removed as far
as possible from the slumbering guardian of the
dead, sat the venerable father of the murdered
maiden, folding her stiffened corpse in his arms,
and pressing it to his bosom with a tenderness as
passionate as if he thought that the pulses of parental
affection which beat within could rekindle
those of life in his departed daughter. The shroud,
with its formal drapery, still veiled the lineaments
of her clay-cold form; but the napkin that shielded
her throat, and the fillet or muslin band that covered
the gash in her forehead, while keeping the long
locks smoothly parted beneath it, had escaped from
their place; and the golden tresses, floating loose,
mingled with the gray hair of the old man, as he
madly kissed the frightful wound through which her
gentle spirit had been dismissed to heaven.

The agonized parent, who had thus crept, in the
dead of the night, to hold this awful communion with
his child, seemed wholly unconscious of the presence
of Greyslaer, who would fain have slunk away
in silence as one who, by unwitting intrusion, profaned

some hallowed mystery; but his power of volition
seemed taken away, and he still continued to
stand, in spite of himself, as it were, with eyes riveted
upon the heart rending spectacle. At length
the mute anguish of the old man found vent in words.
The colour went and came strangely over his ashen
countenance; while his features writhed as if it were
difficult for them to assume the new expression of
malevolent and vindictive feeling they had now for
the first time to wear.

“Brant, cruel Brant,” cried the wretched parent,
“the God—the Christian's God, whom I aided in
teaching thee to worship, may forgive thee this, but
I—I never can. A parent's curse—the curse of a
bereaved and stricken heart, be, oh God, upon—” A
burst of sobs, that for a moment threatened to suffocate
him, cut short the blasphemous appeal; but
history, in the tragic fate of Brant's own family, has
shown how deeply the malediction wrought in after
years; and the old man, like one startled by a spell
himself had evoked, seemed, with the prophetic eye
of approaching dissolution, to foresee the working
of his curse. He shivered as with a grave-chill;
and, dropping now upon his knees, with the lifeless
face of his daughter upturned upon his bosom,
mutely pleading toward heaven, he essayed in
prayer to beseech a pardon and recall his words.
But his quivering lips refused to syllable a sound.
A sudden and subtile agony seemed on the instant
to travel through his limbs and rack his aged frame;
and then, while unresistingly permitting Greyslaer
to take the body from his arms, he sank unconscious
upon the floor.

Calling the old woman to his aid, Greyslaer, with
the tender care of a mother, lifting the fragile form
of her child in which life still feebly hovers, again
consigned the body to its formal receptacle; and,

while the crone busied herself in readjusting the
grave-clothes of the maiden, he turned to raise her
wretched father from the ground.

But the sorrows of the old man had ceased for
ever; the thread of his feeble existence, protracted
only, as it seemed, beyond the usual length, to be
interwoven at the last with more than usual misery,
had snapped beneath the tension of an agonized
spirit. He had been called away—after a long life
of blameless benevolence and Christian meekness,
he had been mysteriously called away in a moment
of contumacy toward Heaven. He departed, indeed,
with a prayer upon his lips, but his last-uttered
words were those of imprecation. He had been
called, though, by a God of mercy!

It was with a sad heart that Greyslaer, after
climbing the hills to strike the trail of his friends,
succeeded at last in overtaking them after an hour's
rapid walk through the forest; nor, for a long time,
could he find the heart to break to Derrick de Roos
the mournful event which he had just witnessed.
The blow was better received than he had anticipated.
The grief of the warm-hearted but mercurial
young man was indeed, in the first instance, passionate
to a degree that was outrageous; but, as it
found an immediate outlet in words—for, in the
madness of his mood, he poured out such a torrent
of curses upon Brant, the author of his sorrows, as
to shock the better-disciplined mind of his friend—
the first paroxysm soon passed over. When this
violent burst of emotion had had its way, he seemed,
by a versatility of feeling not uncommon in persons
of his keen but transient susceptibility to the
impression of the moment, to be almost reconciled
to the event. And his words characteristically betrayed
this condition of his mind. He stood a few
minutes, distracted between the natural wish to return

and aid in the last obsequies to his father, and
an eager impatience to hurry on to the rescue of his
sister, and, at the same time, strike instant vengeance
upon the desolator of his household.

“Yes, I will proceed,” cried he, at last; “and
now Alida—the only living object that remains for
my care—must at once be got out of the clutches
of these hell-hounds. Perhaps, too, after all, my
dear Max, it is better that the old man departed as
he did. There will be wild work doing in the valley
for years to come; and the kind heart of my father
already bled for the distracted state of the country,
as he used to pray that he might never live to
witness the scenes of havoc and of bloodshed that
must soon ensue. Strange! and I used to think it
but an old man's dreaming. Yes, yes, Greyslaer, it
was better that he should be removed at the first
outbreak of the storm, than that those gray hairs
should be left to be still farther bleached by its peltings,
and bowed down to the grave at last, without
his ever beholding the bright days to come that you
and I may yet witness.”

And, with the wonted buoyancy of his gay and not
wholly unselfish nature, refusing thus to entertain a
grief where regret was unavailing—with the sanguine
hopes of Youth gilding thus quickly the clouds of a
new-sprung sorrow, the young man seemed to dismiss
the subject for the present, whatever may have
been his after-emotions. Constitutionally reckless
and unreflecting as he was, it would be doing injustice
to De Roos, however, to say that his step was
as buoyant as before, though he again strode stoutly
forward with his comrades.

10. CHAPTER X.
THE FOREST-TRAIL.

Sands.

“Well, Squire Dirk.” said Balt, breaking a long
silence, and speaking for the first time since the party
had got fairly on the move once more, “I mistrust
that your Injun friend there, Teondetha, or whatever
be the chap's name, that you and Capting Greyslaer
are so thick with, I mistrust that he didn't help you
much, arter all, in finding out old Josie. I'll warrant
me, now, the sarpent's one of Brant's own crew,
sent out to mislead our people. Whereabouts did
the Oneida leave your party?”

“What!” exclaimed Greyslaer; “surely Teondetha
did not desert you. I'll answer with my life
for the fidelity of that Indian.”

“And so, twenty-four hours since, would I with
mine,” said Derrick, sorrowfully. “I've known Teondetha
much longer than you, Max; he was here
at Mr. Kirkland's missionary school while you were
getting your college-training at the east. With our
bows and arrows we used to watch the stone walls
for chipmunks when boys together; often have I
taken off my stocking for him to bag the flying
squirrel, as he climbed to the hollow bough of some
tall chestnut, while I thundered with the back of his
tomahawk upon the decayed trunk below. And in

later years, when he came down to Guy Park with
his tribesmen to receive the government presents,
many a hunt have we had in these woods together.
But one knows not who to trust in times like these;
there's Brant himself was for years my father's
friend, though I never liked the haughty Sachem.”
The last words suggested associations so bitter that
the young man was for the moment overcome by
his emotions, and then, regaining his composure, he
resumed, still in a mournful tone: “Certain it is,
Greyslaer, that Teondetha separated from us in the
forest, but whether from accident or treachery I am
unable to determine.”

“Well, a painter is always a painter, an Injun
always an Injun, no how you may tame 'em; and I
don't quarrel much with the crittur because he chose
to sort with his own kind. No man's to be blamed
for sticking to his colour, for that's human natur
through and through, any way you may fix it. I'm
not mad with him for that. I'm only mad with myself
that I didn't shoot him down jist by accident, as
it might be, afore he got fairly into our councils.”

“Balt!” whispered Greyslaer, in a low but stern
voice, for he did not wish to mortify the faithful
woodsman before his comrades; “to me, Balt, and
to our cause—to all whom you call your friends, I
believe you to be a good man and true; and, as
such, I would peril my life with you or for you; but,
Indian or white, by the God that made me, if you
ever practise such a piece of treachery upon breathing
man, you shall die the death at my hands. I
will pistol you upon the spot.”

“Wh-eu-gh! and what would old Balt care for
that, if, by shooting one of the red devils, he could
save your scalp or squire Dirk's! You're boys, both
on ye, and don't know the natur of an Injun. But
I tell ye, Capting Greyslaer, as I suppose I must

call ye, it isn't fair and comely, it isn't treating me
in a likely manner, to use sich hard words to me,
considerin its only two days gone that I let ye put
down my name on your muster-paper there, as making
myself a raal sodger under you; I might better
have let the cause go to the devil, or have gone and
taken service in Bradshawe's battalion with wild
Wolfert Valtmeyer, rayther than to be spoken to so
like a dog—I might. I almost wish I was shut of
the business of sodgering altogether, if sich talk as
that is to be my wages.”

“If those are your sentiments, my good fellow,”
said Greyslaer, stopping short in his walk, as the
two pursued a path together a little apart from the
rest of the band, “if you really wish to side with
the Tories and shed the blood of your countrymen,
I will strike your name off this paper in an instant,
and you have full liberty to go where you please.”
And Greyslaer drew the muster-roll of his company
from his bosom, as if about to give his last and most
valuable recruit a fair discharge.

“Well, that beats natur; that's raaly the worst
thing, arter all. The boy talks jist as if he could get
along without me. Ah! ye green springald ye! ye
callow fledgling! ye yearling that would gore with
your horns yet in the velvet! ye, with yere book-larnin,
yere speechifying, yere marchings and counter-marchings,
yere shoulder-firelocks, and yere
right foot, left foot, ye'd make a pretty how-de-do
in times like these, with only sich a mad loon as
Squire Dirk to counsel and guide ye! I tell ye
what, Capting Max Grayslaer, I've holpen your edication
in some things that may cause ye to make
a figure in sich times as these, with some one to
look after ye; but, though ye want now to get shut
of me, as if I was an old granny of a Yankee school-master
dogging his urchins in the holydays, I'm d—d

if I give ye up till I've seen the eend of ye. Put
that in yere pipe and smoke it, my laddie! and now
go ahead as soon as ye choose, for where your trail
is there old Balt will follow.”

“A hopeful subject I have here for a disciplined
soldier,” said Greyslaer, mentally. Amused, provoked,
and, at the same time, touched by the petulant
freedom and stanch fidelity of his follower, he silently
abandoned the altercation, and pocketing the
muster-roll with an emphatic “umph!” that said
everything to Balt, once more pursued his way with
the doughty hunter.

“How do you know, Balt,” said he, after they
had walked on for some time in silence, moving
through the forest as nearly as possible in a parallel
line with the main body of De Roos's band, from
which two corresponding flankers had been thrown
out upon the opposite side, “how do you know that
Valtmeyer has taken up arms with the Tories under
Bradshawe?”

“How do I know? why I had it from Red Wolfert
himself only the day before yesterday, when I
left you to go and look after farmer Stickney's tall
sons. Two likely fellows they be, too, those boys,
Syl and Marius Stickney, though Bradshawe has
got 'em clean safe into his following by this time.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean to say that Valtmeyer beat me at 'lectioneering,
that's all. I could only promise the boys
liberty and equality of human rights if they'd turn
out with our people, as they promised they would
at the last training; but Wolfert promised he'd
burn down their barn if they did, and he carried
the day arter all.”

“The pitiful scoundrels!” exclaimed the young
officer, indignantly.

“Yes, capting, seeing as how they promised,

they ought to have come, if it was to a den of rattle-snakes.
But the barn is full of grain, and the old
man had his say, for Wolfert threatened to return
a couple of horses on his hands that he had just
bought with some broad pieces for Bradshawe's
use?”

“Do you think that Valtmeyer would really have
burned the barn?”

“Sarting! and mayhap the housen too. He hates
a white man like pisin, and has jined Bradshawe
jist to work out his grudge agin his own kind and
colour. He burn a farmer's barn? I'd like to see
the day of the week when Red Wolfert Valtmeyer
wouldn't like a pretence for doing of that.”

“And does Valtmeyer think that these two Stickneys
will keep their faith more truly with his people
than they have with ours?” said Greyslaer, not
incuriously.

“Sarting they will,” replied Balt, shaking his
head. “I never knew a Connecticut chap yet but
what stuck to his bargain when it was once made
clean out and out; the snarl of the thing is to find
out what they consider a raal bargain complete.
I rayther mistrust it's only when they put their
names right down in black and white upon paper.
Wolfert, I know, made them do this, he seemed so
tarnal sure of his men for ever and aye. But here
we are at Damond's run, and the squire had better
order a halt, as we must be within half a mile of the
Fish-House clearing.”

In the moment that Balt spoke, a faint signal
from the extreme right, which was repeated by De
Roos from the centre, reached the ears of Greyslaer
and the flankers at once; closing in, the whole
party united upon the banks of the rivulet, at a
point where it first commenced its descent from
the upland. Taking his orders now from De Roos,

for Greyslaer was only acting as a volunteer upon
the expedition, Balt ascended a tall hemlock to reconnoitre
the point to which they were approaching,
and where it was presumed that Brant lay with his
followers.

“How many fires do they count?” cried De Roos
from the root of the tree.

“Fires? Devil the one!” muttered the scout, in a
tone of sullen surprise and chagrin. “A fool's errand
we've come upon. They've shut themselves
up in a block-house and stockade upon the banks
of the river, and our night's bizness is done for.”

“Can we not decoy them from their defences?”
asked Greyslaer, anxiously; “it would be madness
to assault their palisades without artillery, and it
would be folly to wait until cannon can be transported
through woods like these we have traversed
to-night.”

“Easy enough to get some of the critters out,
and pepper 'em for the fun of it,” said Balt; “but
that wouldn't help us in retaking Miss Alida. By
the etarnal thunder! but there's some of the varmint
now, pushing off in a canoe to gig trout or
examine a fish-wier, I don't know which; but I see
by the light of the pine knots in the bow that they
push along mighty slow, as if looking for something
at the bottom of the stream. I have it, I have
it, capting; I have it, squire;” and, as if some rare
device had struck him on the instant, Balt straightway
descended the tree. “We can captivate those
chaps complete, I tell ye, if they only move a little
further down stream, where yon woody mound
shoulders the current. I know the ground here all
to pieces. Those maples, whose round tops are
just now slicked up by the moon, cover a thick undergrowth
that will conceal us in creeping along

the shore, and we can cut off the Injuns from the
fort as soon as they turn the pint.”

“Ay, but how do you know they will turn the
point?” said Greyslaer, who, standing upon a rock
round which the runnel gurgled, looked down the
defile through which it travelled to the river, and
caught a glimpse of the moonlit landscape below.

“Leave that to me, if chance don't fix it,” replied
the woodsman; “and now, Squire Dirk, as you
command here to-night, jist let old Balt order the
position of all of us before we move farther.”

“If you knew the ground, as you say you do,
Balt, you are the proper person to guide us in our
operations. I give you full power to act, if you
will only secure me a chance of trying my yæger
upon the miscreants.”

“Well, well, that shall be cared for, only don't
be too headysome, or you'll spile all. I want to
take the Redskins alive, and get some tidings about
Miss Alida; and, if one be a chief, we may exchange
him. We must divide into three parties to
make sure of our object; I want five of our stoutest
men to creep with me to the water's side, to the
bend south of the mound, where we must secure the
canoe-men, if anywhere. You, squire, must throw
yourself, with the strength of the party, to the north
side, so as to cut off the Injuns from the fort with
your rifles if they escape from our hands and attempt
to return to it. Capting, I'm sorry I cannot
give you more lively work at the outset; but, if the
thing comes to a fight, you will have a sodger's
share of it where I'm going to place you. We must
trust to your spunk and headwork in getting us out
of the scrape if my plan fails; and you must take a
position, with half a dozen men, where you can see
what's going on, and bring us off safely if the
worst come to the worst; and if the fire of Squire

Dirk's party draws a sally from the fort, we shall
see hot work, I tell ye. There's a ledge of bald
rock to the left yonder, that puts out from the ridge
we are on, about a hundred yards from this. That
cliff commands the whole valley below, and there
is a deer runway leading up from the water-side to
its base. That way lies our retreat. A half hour
hence the moon will touch the cliff, whose edge is
still in deep shadow from the hemlock thicket that
covers it; so you must gain it at onct, and lie there
close as a hunted opossum to a gray log. If we
are pursued, you, capting, know as well as I do
what follows; we'll—”

“You will lure the chase to the base of the rock,
make a detour to my rear, and leave me to deal
with the rascals in front. Exactly, Balt; I comprehend
your plan completely; and its details are worthy
of a veteran partisan.”

“I don't know what sort of a chap that may be;
but if it mean an old bushfighter, there's no man in
all Tryon county, not even Red Wolfert himself,
but must knock under to old Balt in expayrience.”
And, with this harmless ebullition of vanity on the
part of the woodsman, the council of war was broken
up. The party was divided agreeably to his
suggestions, and the three bands immediately afterward
separated, and sped with silent haste to their
different destinations. Greyslaer, having but a short
distance to move with his handful of followers, soon
gained the position indicated by Balt; and throwing
himself upon the ground, with his feet hanging
over the rocky ledge, he cast a thoughtful eye over
the sleeping landscape below.

The moon was in her last quarter, but the atmosphere
was so clear that her waning beams
lighted up the scene with a splendour that is rarely
witnessed in other climes. The Sacondaga, which

near this region, at the present day, winds through
green meadows grazed by a thousand cattle, was,
at the time of which we write, thickly wooded
along its banks. The luxuriant foliage of primeval
forests impended in billowy masses over the devious
water, which only showed to view in shining
intervals, like the broken links of a silver chain.
A few cleared acres only, around the Indian stockade,
let the moonlight down more broadly upon the
stream, where the burned and blackened stumps
stood grimly marshalled along the water's edge, like
the dwarfish opponents of the girdled trees, whose
tall, stark stems, and jagged and verdureless array,
bounded the opposite sides of the clearing. The
stockade itself lay a deformed and shapeless mass
of logs in the midst of this desolate area; and the
eyes of Greyslaer, as he watched the twinkling
lights which ever and anon revealed the floating
canoe upon the river, reverted continually to this
sullen den, in which he thought Alida was immured.
He imaged to himself the lady of his love as looking
out with the cheerless spirit of a captive upon
the few dreary acres of the Indian clearing, which
could alone meet her eye from her forest-walled
prison-yard; he thought of her love of nature and
exquisite taste in rural refinement, as seeking vainly
for solace in that circumscribed, uncouth, and
mutilated landscape; and then he thought—so idly
does the mind wander in such a mood—he thought,
reverting to the white man's “improvements,” characterized
by similar features to those of the scene
before him, he thought whether utility could not in
any way work out her ends, by some less unsightly
and devastating process than the ordinary one of
clearing a new country.

“And must the prodigal soul of man, too,” said
he, mentally, “must the primal freshness of all

things earthly be thus wastefully converted to their
final ends? Must the soil of virgin nature be thus
encumbered with the wreck of its beauty, thus enriched
with its own blasted luxuriance, turning
again to earth, ere it gather strength to bear things
that are truly precious? Must the wild heart of
youth, redolent of hope and high affections, moving
with each generous impulse like this plumy forest
to the breeze, must it also give up its first noble,
natural growth of feelings, and become barren and
desolate, like yon blackened clearing, before, like
that, it can bear fruits fit for the best purposes of
social being? * * * The wild Indian, too! Is he
subject to the same mysterious law, or has Nature
a different dispensation for her own immediate children?
Doth age alone ripen his mind, and by
gradual and kindly means steal from him the pledges
of life's morning promise, and lead him to an inviting
grave with youth, all glorious, eternal youth,
still glowing beyond its portals? or doth he too, like
us, grow old before his time, with faculties quickened
by suffering and matured by pain? Doth he,
bewildered by conflicting passions like ours, and
misled by stumbling reason, chase the phantom
Hope where'er she leads? or doth rather a narrow
but subtle instinct deter him from the vain pursuit,
or guide him with unerring finger to fruition?”

“But what boots this vain dreaming?” cried he,
interrupting himself impatiently, as a cloud, at that
moment obscuring the moon, snatched the scene
which had awakened these reflections from his
view. “What matters it that our scheme of existence
should be as vain and uncertain as the landscape
that but now glimmered below me, when
death, like yon cloud, may come at any moment
and obscure it for ever!”

As the last thought passed through the mind of

Greyslaer, and even before language could have
given it shape and utterance, it seemed as if the
chilling image of death had but presented itself as
the precursor of the reality. A sharp, stunning blow,
that came with such force, glancing along his ribs,
as to turn his body completely round, drew a sudden
exclamation of pain and surprise from him. “Hah!
God of Heaven, what's that!” he cried, clapping
his hand to the wound as he rolled over upon the
rock, struggling to gain his feet. But the effort
was vain. He became dizzy on the moment. He
tried to shout to his comrades, but the voice seemed
drowned in other sounds. A fearful yell, that rung
confusedly in his ears, like the spirit call from another
world, swallowed up the feeble cry. But still
he seemed not dead, for a strange sensation, like
that of falling into a fathomless depth, yet called
out the exercise of volition. His hands groped
about as if clutching at something to hold on by,
and then he lay in utter unconsciousness, with the
cold moonlight streaming on his motionless form.

11. CHAPTER XI.
THE HUNTERS' AMBUSCADE.

Street.

The plans of the hunter Balt, when he was permitted
to arrange the movements of his party for
the night, were well laid in every respect save
one; the omission, on the part of De Roos and his
forest counsellor, to keep up a communication with
Greyslaer, either by messengers or signals, to be
available in case they met with any obstacle to the
consummation of their design. The unfortunate issue
of the ambuscade was mainly attributable to
this oversight. “The attempt,” they argued, “must
either be fully successful, when we shall rejoin our
comrades without molestation, or, if we are interrupted
by a sally from the fort or other untoward
occurrence, the report of our firearms will soon
show Greyslaer how things are going.” In guerilla
warfare, however, so much often depends upon an
instantaneous change of the mode in which you
would effect your design when carrying any given
piece of stratagie into execution, that the most perfect
concert of action should be observed if you
would avail yourself of their flexile councils without
endangering your brother partisans.

The two parties, led severally by Balt and De
Roos, gaining the bottom of the hill upon which

they had left the ill-starred Greyslaer, separated
near the base of the promontory before described,
and betook themselves to their appointed stations.
De Roos posted himself, with his men, in a swamp
that friuged a little bay a few hundred yards below
the Indian stockade, from which it was divided by
the river, which was here about a rifle-shot in
breadth. The promontory extended out into the
stream upon his right, and the canoe, which was
the object of attack, was just turning this headland
as he reached his position, and might be said to be
thus already cut off from the fort had he dared to fire
upon her. But Balt, who gained the shore, amid
tangled vines and thickets of elder, upon the lower
side of the promontory, awaited there his opportunity
to seize the fishermen in a more peaceable manner.

Placing his followers in a copse near the mouth
of the brook already mentioned, he proceeded cautiously
to a clump of chestnuts near, and selecting
one fit for his purpose, he cut off a stick about two
feet in length from a green sapling, and, after rolling
it between his palms for a few moments, succeeded
in drawing out the woody part from its bark casing,
forming thus from the latter a hollow tube, which
might answer the purpose of a speaking-trumpet.
Placing one end of this to his mouth, and bending
his body so as to bring the other within an inch of
the ground, and partly to smother the sound he intended
to produce from the instrument, he drew
from it a deep discordant noise, not unlike the distant
roaring of a bull. The call almost immediately
brought a reply, both from the hill-side and from the
water. From the hills it came back in a wild bellowing,
that was evidently that of a real animal answering
a beast of its own kind. Upon the water it
was replied to by the Indians, who, equally deceived
by sounds that seemed to indicate their vicinity to a

moose-deer buck, or bull moose as our hunters call
it, attempted, by putting their closed fists to their
mouths, to mimic the cry and lure the animal to the
water-side, where the torches in the bow of the
shallop would enable them to fix the buck at gaze,
and to approach sufficiently near to destroy him
with their fishing-spears.

Guiding their birchen vessel now into an eddy
of the stream by a scarcely perceptible motion of
the paddle, they approached with care the spot
where Balt and his comrades lay. But the next
moment, exchanging some words with each other
in a low tone, which made them inaudible to those
on shore, the steersman gave a flirt of his paddle,
and the light bark swung round again to the centre
of the stream. Here the Indians paused, as if listening
intently; and the wary Balt, fearing, now that
their attention was fully awakened, to repeat the
same lure, which might fail to deceive them when
so near, resorted to another less easy of detection.

He took a cup from his hunting-pouch, and, stooping
down to the brook, dipped up the water and let
it fall again into the current, to imitate the plashing
footsteps of an animal stalking along the bed of the
stream. The Indians had drawn out toward the
channel of the river, in order to give the supposed
moose a wide berth between themselves and the
shore, where, as he waded out to lave his flanks, according
to the custom of the animal at this season,
they would hold him to advantage in the deep water.
But as the plashing sounds which they had
just heard grew fainter, as if the moose were retiring
from the river side, they abandoned this expectation,
and, mimicking his bellowing cry once more,
they gave the canoe a direction toward the cove,
and glided silently into the mouth of the brook.
Their glaring torches shone double upon its shallow

and pebbly bottom, and lighted up the overhanging
thicket with a ruddy glare.

“Captur, but slay not!” cried Balt, leaping into
the frail shallop with a force that drove his feet
through the flimsy bottom and anchored it to the
spot, at the same moment that an Indian in the bow
was vainly attempting, with his long spear, to push
back into the parent stream. A blow from the hatchet
of the woodsman snapped the shaft, leaving the
barbed end quivering in the bank, and the other a
harmless weapon in the hands of the Indian, who
was instantly secured by his opponent. Not so,
however, with his two comrades; one of those, who
held the steering-paddle, threw himself backward
over the stern, floundered with mad desperation
through the shallow water, and, diving like a duck
the moment he attained that deep enough for swimming,
struck out for the opposite side of the river,
which he gained in safety. The remaining Indian
was not less successful in his attempt to escape.
This man, a warrior of powerful frame and great
prowess, deeming himself surrounded, leaped from
the canoe at the first alarm, and charged into the
midst of his enemies; grasping his fishing-spear by
the middle, so as, at the same time, to protect his
person and prevent the long shaft from becoming
entangled in the underwood, he levelled a yeoman
with a blow from either end at the first onset, and,
seizing a rifle from one of the men as they fell,
bounded off, unharmed, into the forest.

“Old Josey himself, by the Etarnal! there's no
Injun breathing but he could have done that,” cried
Balt; “we have let the head-devil of them all, boys,
slip through our fingers, and we shall have the hull
kennel of hell-hounds let loose upon us in an instant.
We must lose no time in crossing from these parts,
or our scalps will fly off like thistle-down; we must

make a divarsion, too, or we'll lose our prisoner.”
And, binding the hands of his only captive with a
tendril of grapevine, the hunter hastily consigned him
to the care of his comrades, and told them to move
down along the banks of the river as rapidly as possible,
without attempting to regain the place first
designated as a rendezvous. With these hurried
directions, Balt sprang forward to give in person the
necessary warning to De Roos, whom he met midway,
hurrying with his men to join him.

“Turn, Balt, turn, or the dogs will be on our trail
in a moment; I've seen a dripping savage emerge
like a musquash from the water on the opposite
side, where a dozen canoes are drawn up before the
station, and we must put the rapids between them
and our party as quickly as possible.”

“What, risk our only prisoner, squire? when I've
sent my men that way with him, hoping that we
could lead off the pursuit toward the cliff, where
the capting awaits us.”

“It will never do,” said De Roos, still keeping
his party in motion; “Greyslaer will get sufficient
warning to retire in time, seeing the movements
around the fort; and as for our joining him, it is too
late. My men have already seen one armed Indian
skulking between them and the hill, and we may
be at this moment surrounded by a hundred.”

As these words passed hurriedly between the
commander of the expedition and his unlucky adviser,
Balt, who had for the moment allowed his course
to be turned, and himself borne along with the rapid
march of his comrades, stopped short, exclaiming,
“On, then; on, Squire Dirk; you may have changed
our plans for the better, and the capting, mayhap,
would consider your retreat sodger-like, seeing
so many lives are at stake; but I cannot leave him

to take his chance of first hearing of it from the Injuns
themselves.”

With these words, only the first of which were
heard by De Roos, Balt broke away from his comrades,
and ran back until he reached the brook which
the retreating party had crossed a few moments before;
turning then, and following up its current as
the readiest highway that offered, amid the heavy
forests through whose glooms its course occasionally
made an opening toward the moonlit sky.

“Tarnal crittur! she's hid her vixen face,” he exclaimed,
as, looking upward through one of these
openings, he saw that the planet was obscured.
“Shine out, old lily-white, shine out, for shame,
upon the Redskins, or they'll cross the river and be
upon the capting afore I can stir his kiver.”

The prayer of the woodsman was quickly answered.
The moon, indeed, shone out but too soon, for
the sharp crack of a rifle, followed by the war-whoop,
and answered by a brief and irregular discharge
of firearms, showed that her reappearance,
instead of being the harbinger of safety, had been
but the signal for onslaught. Rushing forward, the
hunter gained the top of the hilly ridge whereon he
had left Greyslaer, and was moving with hasty but
cautious steps toward the shelf of rocks where that
luckless officer had taken post with his party.

“The capting, the capting, what have ye done
with the capting?” cried Balt, as he met Greyslaer's
men in full flight from the spot.

“Run, Balt; for your life, run; it is all up with
Captain Max! a rifle from the woods, below the cliff,
picked him off the very moment the moon got high
enough to bring his body out of shadow. The woods
are alive with Redskins, and our legs must save us
now if we would live to avenge him.”

An incessant whooping, that each moment came

nearer and nearer, seemed to prove the truth of what
the man said; and with a light heel but a heavy
heart, the sorrowing woodsman turned and fled with
the rest; muttering imprecations on himself the
while for having left for a moment, amid such
scenes, his commander, friend, and protegé.

De Roos, in the mean time, hurrying along with
his prisoner, followed the course of the Sacondaga,
which here runs in a northeast direction for a few
miles, and then, leaving it abruptly, struck due south,
making for the nearest settlements upon the Mohawk.
The approach of morning found his party
in the neighbourhood of Galway; and crossing the
highway, or trail as it might rather be called at that
day, between Saratoga and Johnstown, he made a
sweep to the south of the latter place, and, striking
due west, passed Stone Arabia, famous afterward
for the gallant fight and subsequent slaughter of the
brave Colonel Brown and his regiment, reached the
Mohawk at Keeder's Rifts, equally noted in the
border-story of after years. The retreat, considering
that De Roos had not only to escape from his
Indian foes in the first instance, but that he carried
his prisoner through a district, the great portion of
whose scattered inhabitants were as yet either luke-warm
patriots or zealous adherents of the Johnson
party, was creditable to his address as a partisan.

Worn down with fatigue and long watching,
Derrick and his companions were rejoiced to find
shelter and refreshment in the hospitable mansion
of Major Jelles Fonda, a faithful officer and confidential
friend of the father of Sir John Johnson, but
who, having now sided with the patriot party, was
exposed to the vengeance of the royalists, which
was afterward so terribly wreaked upon his household
by the devastating hand of the stern and inexorable
son of his friend.

The Mohawk captive, during the route, had borne
himself with dogged indifference to his fate, obstinately
refusing to answer any of the questions with
which De Roos, who spoke his language, plied him,
whenever occasion offered, during a brief halt of his
party. Refreshments were now placed before him,
but he refused to partake of them, replying only to
the repeated invitations of his captors by glancing,
with a look of mute indignation, from their faces to
the bonds by which his right arm was still pinioned,
the left having been temporarily released to enable
him to feed himself. This silent appeal, however,
produced no effect upon his wary captors.

“If the scoundrel is too proud to help himself
with one hand, let us see if fasting wo'n't bring humility
with it,” said one.

“The cunning cat! he only wants to get his claws
free to use them,” cried another; “but he can't come
the mouser over us with his mock dignity.”

De Roos, who had been looking at the accommodations
of his party for the night, at this moment
entered the room, and ordered a guard of three men
to repair with the prisoner to the kitchen, which was
assigned them as their quarters. He at the same
time handed the Indian a blanket, wherewith one
of the females of the family had provided him, and,
for the first time since his capture, a gleam of pleasure
shot athwart the dusky features of the Mohawk
as he stretched out his left hand to receive the boon.
Indeed, he folded it about his person with as much
care as if he took pride as well as comfort in his
new acquisition; nor had he completely adjusted its
folds to his satisfaction, before a corner of his new
mantle had more than once swept the edge of the
table, as he brushed along its sides, while making
his way out of the apartment.

The kitchen was not entirely vacant when the

prisoner and his guard reached their quarters. For,
besides several negro slaves, which at that time formed
an essential part of the household of every opulent
farmer in the country, there sat in the chimney-corner
a shabby-looking wayfarer, who, in those
days of infrequent inns and open hospitality, had
been allowed a stall for his horse and a shelter for
himself during the night.

The dress of this man, which was a sort of greasy
doublet, or fustian shooting-jacket, of dingy olive,
with breeches of the same; shoes without buckles,
and a broad-leaved chip hat, having a broken pipe
stuck beneath the band, marked him sufficiently as
belonging to the lower order of society. For, while
among our wise fathers a man's apparel was always
thought more or less to indicate his social position,
a traveller's especially, who presumed to take the
saddle without being either booted or spurred, would
be set down as near akin to a beggar, who had his
horse only for some chance hour. Some, however,
beneath the neglected beard and generally sordid
appearance of this wayfaring horseman, might have
detected features which, if not those of a true cavalier,
belonged at least to the class which was then
generally supposed exclusively to furnish such a
character. The man's look was sinister, if not decidedly
bad; but there was a degree of haughtiness
mingled with his duplicity of expression, and the intelligent
and assured air of his countenance was far
above the rank which his coarse habiliments would
indicate. He started as the Indian entered the
apartment; and as the name “Au-neh-yesh!” escaped
his lips, the emotion seemed for the instant
to be sympathetic with the prisoner. It was so
slight, however, upon the part of the Mohawk as
not to attract observation. He moved at once toward
the kitchen fire, and, though it was a summer's

night, threw himself on the floor with his feet
toward the ashes, and, covering up his head in his
blanket, seemed soon to be forgetting the cares of
captivity in soothing slumber.

Two of the men to whose custody the prisoner
had been consigned soon afterward imitated his example,
and stretched themselves upon a flock-bed
in a corner of the apartment, while the third paced
up and down the room, to keep himself awake while
acting as sentinel over the prisoner. The slaves,
with the exception of a single old negro, had all
slunk away, one could hardly tell how; and this
worthy, with the sinister-looking traveller, were left
as the only waking companions of the sentinel. The
traveller, too, at last, after ruminating in a drowsy
fashion for some time, expressed his intention of
seeking a bed in the haymow, and, procuring a stable-lantern
from the negro to look after his horse in
the first instance, withdrew from the apartment. In
passing through the door, he fixed his eyes earnestly
upon the sleeping Indian, and his face being thus
averted from the passage-way, he stumbled awkwardly,
so as to make his tin lantern clang against
the lintel so sharply as to startle both the sentry
and his prisoner, though the slight movement which
the latter made beneath his blanket was not observed
by the soldier, who turned to close the door behind
the retreating traveller.

“What tink you of dat trabeller-man, massa?”
said the old negro, with a knowing look, as soon as
he heard the outer door closed after the other.

“Think of him? why I don't think of him at all,
Cuff; that sleeping hound by the fire is enough for
me to trouble myself about, after trampoosing for
twenty-four hours on a stretch, with not even a
loon's nap at the eend of it.”

“Trabeller-man hab mighty fine hoss, massa!

Him look as like as two peas to de hoss dat Wolf
Valtmeyer bought last week for Massa Bradshawe,
and drew to here, mighty like dat same hoss,
massa.”

“Well, what of that? you don't take the chap for
a horse-thief, do you? He's more like some travelling
cobbler, that's going his circuit through the
settlements.”

“He be bery like a cobbler, certing,” said the
complaisant negro; and then, after musing a few
moments, added, “He be bery like lawyer Wat
Bradshawe too, massa.”

“I never saw that rip, Cuff, though, if the traveller
has heard as much of him as I have, he wouldn't
be beholden to you for discovering the likeness.”

“Lawyer Wat has shaked hands wid de debbil,
certing!” said the negro, shaking his head mysteriously.

“Why do you say that, Cuff?”

“'Cause he no fear de debbil.”

“Why, what the devil do you know about him,
you old curmudgeon?”

“Hab not old black Violet told me of his doings
long ago, when he was but a boy? Let Cuff alone
to find out de secret; he know all about Massa
Bradshawe, and he know how to keep de secret too.”

“Now, Cuff,” said the soldier, stopping short in
the middle of the room, “you see that Injun there!
Well, he's a raal Injun juggler, and, unless you tell
me instantly your secret, as you call it, I'll stir up
that fellow with the butt end of my rifle, and he
shall fill this room with fiery sarpents in a moment.”

The poor superstitious negro recoiled with horror
at this alarming threat. He had all the awe of
his race for the red man, who, having never been
reduced to subservience by the white, is regarded
by the docile African partly as a wayward,

wicked, and disobedient child, who refuses to be
guided by those who have a natural right to authority,
and partly as a hybrid, heathenish mortal, in
whose paternity the devil has so large a share that
the Indian is unfitted to take a part in the ordinary
lot of mankind.

“Why you see, massa,” said he, beginning at
once, with trembling lips, to tell his story, “it was
when old Dinah, the black witch, that perhaps you
have heerd tell on, was living. She used sometimes,
of a winter's night, to be let in at de house of
Massa Walter's papa, where she slept by de kitchen
fire, but always went up de chimbley on a broom-stick
before de morning. Violet herself say—and
Violet live at de house for many years—Violet say
she often let Dinah in, but she nebber in her life
see her go out, 'cept one morning, and den she went
out a corpse; and she die wid pains and aches, oh
horrible! so Violet say—”

“The devil take Violet; out with your story;
what had Wat Bradshawe to do with the business?”
cried the impatient soldier, thinking matter might
be forthcoming from this kitchen gossip that would
reward him by adding something worth repeating
to the many strange stories that were told of Bradshawe
throughout the country.

“What Massa Walter do?” exclaimed the negro,
lowering his voice; “why, who but he dat
kill de old woman! Massa Wat, he watch Dinah
go up de chimbley, he see dat de black witch always
slip off her skin, and hang it up behind de
pantry-door before she go up. So he watch him
chance, like a mad boy he was; he go to de dresser,
take de casters, put pepper, mustard, and plenty
salt on de skin; him chuckle, laugh, say `he make
de debbil ob de old woman.' Well, de witch come
back, slip into her skin, she kick, she holler, she

fall down in fit, and so she die, and dat de end ob
Missy Dinah.”

“Why—you—tar—nal—old—black—fool!” said
the soldier, with a ludicrously indignant expression
of baffled curiosity. “You—you—you jackass—
you. I've more than a mind to stir up this Injun
juggler, to show what raal deviltry is, Cuff, for making
me listen to such heathen stuff as that.”

As the soldier spoke, he advanced so near to the
sleeping Mohawk as to strike him with his foot
while heedlessly throwing it out to annoy the apprehensive
negro. He had better have alarmed a
coiled rattlesnake. For a knife, as deadly as the
fangs of a serpent, was the next moment plunged
in his bosom as the captive leaped upon him. A
window was thrown wide open by some unseen
hand in the same moment. The negro stood speechless
with horror; and, before the slumbering comrades
of the unfortunate sentinel could rouse to
avenge him, his scalp was filched from his head
by the carving-knife which the Indian had secured
beneath his blanket while brushing past the supper-table.
He shook his gory trophy in the affrighted
eyes of his half-awakened foemen, and bounded
like a deer through the window.

In the morning there were no traces to be found
either of the young savage or the suspicious-looking
itinerant.

12. CHAPTER XII.
THE INDIAN LEECH.

Bryant.

The wound of Greyslaer had been given precisely
in the manner described by the panic-struck
fugitive, though both he and De Roos were mistaken
in thinking that their party was surrounded. A
large body of Indians had indeed crossed the river,
under the shelter of the cape or headland, during
the few moments that the moon was obscured; but
this was after De Roos was in full retreat: and the
“skulking savage” who had so alarmed his followers,
as well as the sharpshooter who had subsequently
picked off Greyslaer, and struck a panic into his
party in turn, was no other than the single desperado
who had so gallantly achieved his escape from
the canoe. This formidable warrior—for, as Balt
surmised, it was no other than “old Josey,” or
Thayendanagea himself—was aided by fortune, not
less than by his own address, in escaping the perils
of the night. Foiling by his prowess the ambushed
foes that attempted to seize him, he had, in
the first instance, after breaking from their hands,
struck directly across the neck of the promontory

as the shortest way to the station. He had nearly
gained the little bay on this side, where he would
take the water to swim to the opposite shore, when,
discovering the position of De Roos's band by
hearing some of the outlyers whispering together,
he made a detour to turn their flank. The gleam
of his rifle soon after betrayed his vicinity to them,
as was indicated by a movement of alarm among
them; and, perceiving that he was observed, he
widened his circuit by striking inland toward the
hill. This route brought him immediately beneath
the projecting ledge whereon Greyslaer was
reclining. Deeming himself now surrounded by
foes, the chieftain thought that it only remained for
him to fight his way through them as best he might;
and when the moon, after being a few moments
obscured by a cloud, shone out, bringing the form
of Greyslaer above him in clear relief against the
sky, Brant discharged his piece and raised the
war-whoop. His fire was returned with a volley
from the bushes, where the whites lay within a few
yards of their officer; but their shot were thrown
away, for the darkness that reigned below the cliff
prevented them from taking aim at their unseen
assailant. The single war-whoop of Brant was the
next moment echoed back by a tumultuous yell
from the nearer side of the river, and the dismayed
borderers, hearing no order from their insensible
leader, concluded that he was slain, and sought their
own safety in instant flight.

The darkness of the woods rendered pursuit ineffectual.
The forest rung for a while with the impatient
yells of an Indian chase, and then, before
an hour had passed away, the lonely whoop of some
solitary savage, hailing his comrades after a reluctant
and disappointed return, was all that met the
ear These last sounds, had Greyslaer had sufficient

consciousness to comprehend them, would
have told him of the safety of his friends, however
precarious might be his own. The wounded officer,
upon reviving from his swoon, found himself
stretched upon a pile of skins in an Indian wigwam,
with a noble-looking Mohawk, a man of majestic
figure and commanding aspect, standing near, with
eyes bent keenly upon his own. Greyslaer made
a movement as if to lift one of his hands, and was
about to speak, but the Medicine-man—for such the
Indian seemed by the talisman which he wore
around his neck, as well as other emblems and
equipments of the aboriginal leech, or conjuror's
trade, that marked his appearance—motioned the
youth to remain silent and quiet. The sage then,
baring the wound by stripping off some moss or
lichen with which the blood had been temporarily
stanched, proceeded to dress it. This he did, with
the assistance of a withered old squaw, who stood
by, holding the various preparations in her hands,
while ever and anon she bowed reverently to the
muttered charm of the operator. When this part of
his medical treatment was carefully completed, the
magician administered a draught with the same solemn
and superstitious ceremonial; and his patient
soon after slept.

The slumberg of Greyslaer must have been long
and refreshing, for he found himself so much revived
upon awaking as to feel a disposition to rise.
But upon the first indication of such an intention,
his ears were saluted by a shrill and discordant cry
from the old squaw, who sat crouched among the
ashes, watching a brazen kettle, into which from
time to time she cast certain roots and herbs, muttering
some gibberish to herself the while. Her
call was answered from without by a gruff “umph,”
as of some voice chiding her shrewish cry; and

straightway the mat which formed the only door of
the lodge was raised, and the benignant features of
the Medicine-man were seen at the entrance. He
advanced to the couch of Greyslaer, and placing
his hand upon the forehead of his patient, while he
gazed upon him thoughtfully for some moments,
seemed to be at length thoroughly satisfied with the
results of his treatment thus far, for straightway he
began to engage him in conversation, speaking
English at the same time with an ease and fluency
that astonished the soldier-student.

“The Spirit hath not yet need of thee in another
land, young man. He leaves thee here yet
a while, to repent of thy wickedness in aiding to
drive his red children from their country.”

“I drive them? I love the Indians!” said Greyslaer,
with spirit. “It is only those who make
themselves the slaves of a foreign king, to aid in
enchaining my countrymen. It is only the murderous
Brant and his renegade crew upon whom I
would make war.”

“Darest thou, young man, speak thus of the great
Thayendanagea? and yet it fits thy presumptuous
years to pass in judgment upon the deeds of a sachem
who hath sat in council with the wisest of thy
race.”

“The great Thayendanagea!” scornfully repeated
Max. “A presumptuous half-breed! whose
demi-barbarous vanity has been tickled by sharing
in the mummery of European courts. A degenerate
hound, that has exchanged the noble instincts
of his forest training for the dainty tricks of a parlour-bred
spaniel. He sit in council! the poor tool
of profligate Tory partisans, who will use him to
enslave his people when they have destroyed mine.”

The eyes of the Medicine-man shot fire as
Greyslaer, feverish perhaps from his wound, spoke

thus intemperately of Brant, whose doubtful Indian
origin did not commend him to the romantic student,
and whose clerkly employment as secretary of
Guy Johnson had not raised him in the eyes of the
aspiring young soldier; while recent events made
Max regard him as a crafty, cruel, semi-civilized
barbarian, who brought the name of “Mohawk”
into abhorrence and contempt. Greyslaer had his
eyes fixed upon the rafters above him while thus
warmly and disdainfully inveighing against the captor
of Alida, and he did not, therefore, observe the
agitated movement with which the Medicine-man
carried his hand to the knife which he wore in his
girdle, though, from the excitement under which
he spoke, it is doubtful if even such observation
would have restrained his heated expressions.

The magician took two or three turns through
the narrow apartment before he trusted himself to
reply, which he did at last with calmness and dignity.

“Young man, you speak falsely, though probably
unknowingly, in calling Joseph Brant a half-breed;
and, were you not intrusted by him to my
care, you should die on this ground for so vile a
slander. Thayendanagea is a Mohawk of the full
blood. And if any gainsay this truth, Brant, much
as he holds your European usages to scorn, will—I
take it upon myself to say—meet any rebel officer
of his own rank in private quarrel, after the foolish
fashion of the whites. For the rest—” and here
a strange and undefinable expression of emotion
passed over the swarthy features of the speaker,
who seemed to hesitate for words to express his
mingled feelings—“for the rest, the Sachem would,
I know, forgive you for the love you seem to bear
his race; and it may be true that he has done ill
in linking the fortunes of his tribe with those of

either party of the whites. The carrion birds might
have quarrelled over the carcass, but the eagle
should never have stooped to share their wrangling,
if he would soar with untainted plumage.”

“Your tribesmen, noble Mohawk, if indeed you
be an Indian,” answered Greyslaer, touched by the
proud yet feeling tone with which the last words
were uttered, “your red brethren had indeed better
keep aloof from us, alike in war or in peace, for
they seem to acquire only the worst attributes of
civilized life by attempting to mingle with us as
one people: and their share in this struggle must—”

“Ay, you speak well, young man,” interrupted
the Indian, now wholly thrown off his dignified
reserve of manner by what appeared to be a theme
of great excitement with him; “if your vaunted
civilization be not all a fraud, your perverted learning
but a shallow substitute for the wisdom of the
heart, your so-called social virtues but a loose covering
for guile, like the frail thatch of leaves that
hides the traps of an Indian hunter; if your religion
be not a bitter satire upon the lives of all of
ye; if, in a word, all your conflicting teachings
and practices be indeed reconcilable to Truth and
pleasing to The Spirit, then hath he created Truth
of as many colours as he hath man; and his red
children should still rest content with the simple
system which alone their hearts are fitted to understand.”

Greyslaer was precisely at that age when most
men of an imaginative cast of mind mistake musing
for philosophizing, sentiment for religion; and with
that ready confidence in the result of one's own reflections
and mental experience which is the darling
prerogative of youth and immaturity of thought, he
did not hesitate to assume the attitude of a teacher
in reply to the last remark of the Indian. “Truth,

noble Mohawk, hath ever been, will ever be the
same. But the truths of the other world, as well as
of this, are often wrapped in mystery. God has, in
two dispensations of light from above, revealed to
mortals so much of his holy truth as the human
mind was fitted to receive.

“The first revelation was like a dawn in the forest,
where the young day shoots its horizontal rays
beneath the dusky canopy of tree-tops, and, glancing
between the columned trunks, streams upon the path
of the benighted wanderer of the wilderness. That
matin-light—those holy rays of the virgin morn of
true religion—I am willing to believe, illumined the
lake-girdled mountains of the Iroquois hunter as
well as the cedar-crowned hills of the Hebrew
shepherd. It shone alike, perhaps, upon the pathway
of either, if indeed they were not one and the
same people. But the realm of glory to which that
pathway led; the snares that beset it; the solace
and refreshment that lay within reach of the traveller,
alternating his perils, these it required a second
revelation to bring to light; when the sun of righteousness,
fairly uprisen, should throw the blaze of
noontide into that forest, revealing now, in stern
reality, its yawning caverns, its precipices and pitfalls;
now touching with mellow beauty its mossy
resting-places, or sparkling with cheerful radiance
upon its refreshing wayside-waters; and now bathing
with glorious effulgence the region beyond
the wilderness, where lay the final rest and reward
of the wanderer. The good men of my race, therefore,
preach not a new Truth to the Indian! they
seek but to share with him that broader light which
has been vouchsafed to us regarding the same one
Eternal Truth.”

The Mohawk listened with an air of deep respect
to the earnest language of the youth, but his

own feelings and prejudices were too deeply excited
to permit the discussion long to preserve the
abstract character which Greyslaer attempted to
give it.

“I spoke not against the truths of Christianity,”
said he; “for they may have their sanctuary
as well in the desert and the forest as in the city;
I spoke not, I say, of the pure light of Christianity,
which your mobbled faith no more resembles than do
the stained and distorted rays that struggle through
a dungeon's window resemble the beams of the
noontide sun. The holy teachings of your Master
come to us like those unwholesome airs which,
travelling cut pure and invigorating from the skies,
are polluted and made pestiferous by traversing
some noxious marsh before they reach the unfortunate
mortal who is doomed to breathe them. It is
your vaunted social system from which I recoil with
loathing. Your so-called civilization is, in its very
essence, a tyrant and enthraller of the soul; it merges
the individual in the mass, and moulds him to
the purposes, not of God, but of a community of
men. It follows the guidance of true religion so far
only as that ministers to its own ends, and then it
turns and fashions anew its belief from time to
time, to suit the `improved' mechanism of its artificial
system. In crowded Europe the evil is irremediable;
for man the machine occupies less room
than man the herdsman or hunter; but your mode
of existence is not less a curse to ye—the white
man's curse, which he would fain share with his red
brother! But have I not seen how it works among
you? Have I not been to your palaces and your
churches, and seen there a deformed piece of earth
assume airs that become none but the great Spirit
above? Have I not been to your prisons, and seen
the wretched debtor peering through the bars? You

call the Indian nations cruel! Yet liberty to a rational
creature as much exceeds property in value
as does the light of the sun that of the smallest
twinkling star! But you put them on a level, to
the everlasting disgrace of human nature. I have
seen the white captive writhing at the Indian stake,
and rending the air with shrieks of agony; strange
that the unhappy man did not endeavour, by his fortitude,
to atone in some degree for the crimes committed
during the life thus justly shortened. I have
witnessed all the hideous torments that you ascribe
to such a death, and yet I had rather die by the most
severe tortures ever inflicted by the Indian than
languish in one of your prisons a single year!
Great Spirit of the Universe! and do you call yourselves
Christians? Does the religion of him you
call your Saviour inspire this spirit and lead to these
practices?”[3]

Greyslaer, who listened with curious attention to
this strange harangue, as coming from the lips of an
Indian, was completely bewildered by the fluency
and energy with which the magician delivered his
tirade, and he scrutinized his features and complexion,
as if expecting to discover the lineaments of
some disguised renegado white, who, with talents
fitted for a better sphere, had, induced by caprice
or compelled by crime, banished himself from society,
and assumed the character of one of the aborigines.
But the natural and easy manner in which
the object of his suspicions turned the next moment
and addressed the Indian woman in her own language,
not less than the veneration with which the

squaw received his behests, dispelled the idea, while
little opportunity was given him for making a more
minute examination. The Medicine-man, smiling
blandly, as if he read what was passing in the mind
of his patient, approached to his side, and telling
him that he was now about to consign him to the
care of others, asked Greyslaer, as the only return
expected for any service he might have rendered
him, to curb his tongue hereafter in speaking of Joseph
Brant!

Before the patriot officer could reply, the magician
had turned upon his heel and gained the door;
but, as if struck with an after thought, he instantly
returned, and, ere Greyslaer was aware of his intention,
he had bared his arm to the shoulder, produced
a stained flint from his pouch, and branded an uncouth
device, that made the skin smart with pain as
the blood oozed through.

“He who loves the Red-man may die by rifle or
tomahawk, but he will never be disgraced by the
scalping-knife or tortured at the stake if he shows
this mark to the followers of Thayendanagea!”

And, before Greyslaer could find language to express
his astonishment, either at the act or the words
which accompanied it, he was alone with the old
woman, who busied herself in reverentially picking
up and putting away the mumming tools of his profession
which the pseudo magician had flung upon
the ground as he disappeared through the door.

13. CHAPTER XIII.
THE SQUAW CAMP.

MS. Poems.

The above lines describe, not inaptly, the scene
to which the wounded prisoner had been carried for
safety and seclusion. The lodge in which Greyslaer
lay helpless upon the bed of pain, stood, among
several others in the wilderness, remote from the
station where the warriors of the Mohawks were
collected; and, from the pleasant murmur of female
voices, and cheering call of children at play, which
met his ear when returning strength enabled the
wounded officer to be more observant of things
around him, he soon became aware that his present
domicil must be none other than the “Squaw Camp”
of Thayendanagea; a lonely fastness where, in time
of war, the women and children of his tribe were
sequestered for safety.

Eager to catch at anything to vary the monotony
of slow convalescence, and prompted by that thirst
for sunshine and the breeze which gives such a
yearning to the sick man's spirit, Greyslaer would
fain have expressed his desire to be lifted out in
front of the lodge. But, ignorant of the Mohawk
language, he found some difficulty in making the

old squaw, who, as his only nurse, affected to regulate
all his movements, understand his wishes. Her
consent to the step, however, was obtained without
any great difficulty, and she transported the invalid
beyond the porch by dragging his pallet of skins,
with the patient upon it, to the outside of the wigwam.

A rivulet, bounded upon the opposite side by a
wall of vines and briers, which in their turn were
overhung by tall aspens, intermingled with the
swamp-ash and dusky tamarack, rippled against the
mossy bank whereon he lay, and hid its wanderings
in mazy thickets beyond. The hammock whereon
the cluster of wigwams which formed the camp had
been raised, seemed to afford the only spot firm
enough for such a purpose amid the spongy and
quaking morass that spread around on every side.
And this grassy esplanade was so limited in extent,
that a clump of witch-elms growing in the centre
cast their drooping branches nearly to the middle of
the stream that bathed the wild flowers on its edges.

Beneath one of these trees was collected a group
that instantly arrested the earnest gaze of the captive
officer. A merry crew of children, which seemed
to have been confided to her care, were playing
with a large, solemn hound that reposed at the feet
of a slim Indian girl. The girl, leaning against the
tree, with one pretty foot upraised upon its straggling
roots, sat weaving a baldric of silk and wampum,
whose gaudy strings lay partly on the green
sod beside her, and were partly held in long beaded
cords by a noble-looking woman that stood behind
her, playfully twining the gay tassels in the raven
locks of her companion. The face of the larger and
more commanding maiden was averted from his
gaze when her person first caught the eye of Greyslaer;
but her snowy hand, resting for a moment

upon the nut-brown neck of the Indian girl, sufficiently
revealed to him the neighbourhood of one of
his own race and colour; perhaps a countrywoman;
perhaps, indeed—he could scarcely repress a cry of
joy at the thought of the bare possibility—perhaps
Alida! The proud and commanding mien—proud,
even though something mournful in her air was
blended with the half sportive act in which she was
engaged—was surely that of Alida. The same dejection
or listlessness of manner, call it which you
will, it was true, might characterize any female captive
so situated; but the scenes which Miss De Roos
had recently passed through would best mark her
as the victim of present melancholy.

So Greyslaer thought, and his surmises were almost
ripened to a certainty when he looked again
at the hound. He thought he beheld in him the
cause of an outcry which had been more than once
raised near his cabin, as the shrewish squaw beat
off a dog that from day to day persisted in thrusting
his nose under the blanket which formed the door,
and smelling round as if in search of an acquaintance.
The invalid had himself noticed the intrusion
as pertinacious, but believed the offender to be
merely one of the wolfish mongrels that hang round
an Indian camp. It was like recognising an old
friend to discover his mistake. “Brom!” he called,
in a low voice; the hound raised his ears. “Brom!”
he repeated, in the same suppressed tone. The dog
shook off the urchins that beleaguered him as he
sprang to his feet and looked anxiously around.
“Brom, my poor fellow!” said Greyslaer, somewhat
louder, and the hound bounded upon him, devouring
him with caresses.

“Down, sir, down,” he cried, extricating himself
with difficulty from this overpowering outbreak of
affection, and turning to look for the fair mistress of

the animal. But Alida, if it were indeed she, had
disappeared on the instant; and the Indian girl, collecting
her work together, was preparing to follow
her companion.

The wounded Greyslaer, whose situation prevented
his moving, was filled with grief and vexation
when, unheeding every gesture by which he
attempted to arrest her attention, the Indian girl also
flitted from the spot. He sank back, exhausted with
agitation, upon his couch of skins; and believing
almost that his fevered senses had deceived him,
turned the next moment to look for the dog, to see
if he too had been spirited away. The hound had
couched down a few yards off, where he sat watching
his new-found acquaintance. He wagged his
tail, and approaching as he caught an encouraging
look from Greyslaer, proved, by rubbing his cold
nose against the hand of his friend, that he at least
was a substantial thing of earth.

“Why, old Brom, are you still true to your mistress's
friend, while she flies his presence as if he
were an evil spirit?”

The dog looked as if he had every disposition in
the world to comprehend what was said to him, but,
like most dogs who fail in such endeavour, gave no
reply.

“But here comes my termagant nurse, and you
must walk off, my poor fellow.”

As the youth spoke he warded off a blow which
the truculent dame aimed at the hound with a stick
which she seized from the ground, and which Greyslaer,
snatching from her hand, shook at her in a
threatening manner, to show his displeasure, before
casting it into the stream near him. The worthy
Brom, meanwhile, either understanding the last
words which had been addressed to him, or unwilling
to create scandal by causing a domestic broil in

Greyslaer's establishment, wisely abstracted himself
as fast as his legs could carry him. It is a curious
fact, that a well-bred dog, who has been happy in
his associations with the polite of our species, will
never fly at a woman or child; and Brom, though he
preferred running to fighting in the present instance,
curled his tail so erect upon his retreat, that no
suspicion could attach to his valour. Turning round
when he had gained a discreet distance from the
virago, he paused for a few moments, and looked
back upon her with a countenance more in sorrow
than in anger before taking up the lazy trot with
which he finally disappeared behind a remote wigwam
of the group.

The young officer was not at a loss to account
for the conduct of the white lady in apparently
avoiding him, if she were here a captive like himself.
But, assuming her to be such, he could conceive
no satisfactory reason for her discouraging
every kind of communication between them. Yet
such seemed really to be the case when, a few days
after his first transient glimpse of her person, his eye
again encountered her figure, as, with the luxurious
laziness of an invalid, he loitered in the cool shade,
musing upon his situation. His strength, which had
rapidly improved within the last few days, enabled
him now to move toward the lady; but the eager
cry with which he pronounced the name of “Alida”
warned her of his approach; and its earnest and
anxious repetition only added quickness to the speed
with which she eluded his pursuit.

The dispirited Greyslaer began now to doubt
whether or not the fair captive, for such both the
dress and complexion proclaimed her to be, were
really Miss De Roos. And yet, while it would be
equally strange for any other of his countrywomen
to practise a similar avoidance, considering the situation

of both parties, and how much a good understanding
between them might tend to facilitate their
mutual escape, the circumstances under which Alida
had been carried off, and the presence of her favourite
dog in company with the mysterious maiden,
seemed sufficiently to prove that the white lady
could be no other than Miss De Roos.

Another suspicion which passed through the
mind of Greyslaer was hastily dismissed as unworthy
both of Alida and himself, considering the
perils which he had encountered to restore her to
her friends. It was, that the coldness with which
she had ever frowned upon his boyish suit actuated
her conduct in their present situation. “She is unwilling,”
said he, bitterly, “to receive succour at
my hands. Nay, she is indifferent to the disaster
which had overtaken me in attempting to rescue
her; and regardless, perhaps, as to what may be
my fate as a wounded prisoner in the hands of these
savages; and yet she lacks not humanity! Surely,
am I less than naught to her?”

We have said that Greyslaer repelled these unworthy
suspicions, and so he did, indignant that a
thought demeaning to his mistress should have
found a place in his mind, much less shaped itself
into words. He repelled it, but in vain, for the
same ungenerous thought recurred again and again,
with withering effect upon his already depressed
spirits.

Alas! what a slight does that thought bring over
a young, ardent, ingenuous mind! The thought
that it hath lavished its wealth of loving upon one
who not only can make no return, but who cares
not, recks not how prodigally the treasures of the
heart may be wasted; who regards the most generous
sacrifices of disinterested feeling as mere incense
upon the altar of vanity; who derides the

idolatry of true affection, and holds the deepest
throes of devoted passion but as idle sallies of
youthful extravagance that have no claim upon her
sympathy, that can never awaken her gratitude!
Such, however, is too often the recompense of the
misplaced affection that knows not how to conceal
or regulate its own overflowings.

Ingratitude, however, is not, therefore, the special
fault of the sex! It is human nature, not woman
nature, which sets lightly by a homage which has
never been solicited, and which is paid without
stint! When that homage is pertinacious and unseasonable,
it becomes irksome and offensive. The
attentions of love that we do not reciprocate, however
pleasing to our vanity at first, cease to flatter
when passion increases to infatuation. The idolatry
which springs from too extravagant an appreciation
of our character or personal qualities, seems
akin either to folly or madness, and we no longer
value the good opinion which is the offspring rather
of a heated fancy than of a judgment which we
can respect.

But though these chilling laws of reasoning human
nature admit of but little mitigation, yet Alida
de Roos was of too magnanimous a spirit to apply
them in full to one who loved her, if not wisely,
yet with all truth and nobleness; and seeing in her
youthful admirer all the qualities to awaken a sister's
tenderness, she mourned his infatuation with a
sister's sorrow. Love him she thought she never
could, even if her heart had not been preoccupied
by an emotion that closed it completely against
such a sentiment. Her haughty and aspiring mind
had hitherto detected no qualities in Greyslaer's
character which could touch it to gentle issues. It
was only as the refined but visionary student, the
romantic cherisher of vain and speculative dreams,

such as float around a young enthusiast who knows
the world through books alone, that Greyslaer had
hitherto appeared to the lady of his love. The play
of his polished fancy, the allurements of his cultivated
intellect, had interested her in studying the
character of a stripling who, some years her junior,
and continually thrown in her society as the most
intimate friend of her brother, did, not unnaturally,
attract her kindly regard. But while, with less
mental acquirement upon her own part, Alida perhaps
over-estimated that of which Greyslaer could
boast, yet her esteem for his talents and accomplishments
was full as nearly allied to pity as to admiration.
She admired the qualities in themselves, but
she thought that their possessor, in this instance,
was deficient in the power to make them useful
either to himself or to others. She thought the
character of Greyslaer was wholly unsuited to the
country and the circumstances amid which his lot
was cast. He possessed the requisites, among
other scenes and other times, to grace a fortune or
uphold an honourable name; but he lacked the
stirring qualities to win either by his own exertions.
He was, in a word, one whose impracticable, feeble,
or misapplied energies doomed him to mediocrity
in life; a mediocrity which, by the comfortable
respectability that she believed would attend it,
gained nothing in the eyes of a woman whom poverty
or peril would never have prevented from sharing
the destiny of the man she loved.

'Twas strange! yet the acute-minded Alida de
Roos seemed never to dream that the wild devotion
which the student bore her was what absorbed all
the salient energies of his soul; that she was the
bond that kept its pinions from mounting; that idolatry
for her alone had robbed ambition's shrine of
Greyslaer's worship; that love—love only—all-absorbing,

all-devouring love, had delved the grave in
which his youth's best promise was swallowed up!

The bitter reflections of the lonely prisoner were
destined to a more early and agreeable relief than
he had anticipated. An hour or more had passed
away, and Greyslaer still sat beneath the weeping
elm, now moodily gazing upon the stream that
twinkled through the bushes near him, and now
casting a fierce and impatient glance upon some
lounging Indian, an aged or broken-down warrior
of the band, who had been left by the chief for the
nominal protection of the camp. At last an object
of more agreeable interest presented itself in the
shape of Brom, the stag-hound. Greyslaer had
not seen the dog for some days; and surmising
that the friendly animal had been kept out of his
sight by design, he was at once struck with the
peculiarity of his conduct now, as the hound, instead
of bounding eagerly forward to fawn upon
him, exhibited the coolest indifference to the call of
his friend. The sagacious Brom went wandering
hither and thither, smelling idly along the ground,
and, though gradually coming nearer, making his approaches
after such a careless fashion, that Greyslaer
was in doubt whether the brute knew him or
not. He whistled, and again called him by name;
but the dog, raising his head, looked vacantly
around him, and then resumed his course, without
adding either to the rapidity or directness of his
steps. At last, getting within a few yards of his
friend, the worthy Brom appeared to be for the first
time aware of his neighbourhood, though not until
he had first passed by, and, as it seemed, thrown a
chance look over his shoulder, which induced him
to turn and come gravely forward, as not wishing to
cut an old acquaintance by design. Amused with
“the airs” of the dog—for in happier days Greyslaer

had frequently seen him put on the same whimsical
dignity for less cause than might have given
Brom offence at his last visit to the wigwam—the
young man took the head of the hound in his lap
and patted it kindly. Brom only acknowledged
the caress by rubbing his head against the knees of
his friend, as if his collar were too tight for him;
and, placing his hand under the clasp to loosen it,
Greyslaer felt beneath it a scroll of birchen bark,
whose smooth and flexible texture allows it to be
written upon and folded like paper. Agitated with
joy at the discovery, the surprise of the youth did
not, however, prevent him from instantly concealing
the missive in his dress; while the wise Brom, apparently
contented with the interview, went smelling
and loitering on his way around the camp, as
if his tour was one of idleness altogether.

The note, as read by Greyslaer the moment he
had attained the interior of his lodge, from which
his quondam nurse and present amiable house-keeper
was happily absent, contained only these
words, written with charcoal:

14. CHAPTER XIV.
THE HAUNTED ROCK.

Sands.

“And what fears The Spreading Dew in this
place, that she would have me now choose another
for her to lead the white man to, that I may hear
tidings of my friends?”

“This rock whereon we sit, lady—for Teondetha
told me thou wert a chieftainess among thy people
—this rock is sacred to the spirit that watches over
true affection. Here the young hunter breathes the
vow that binds his fidelity for ever. And she that
hearkens to it here, if listening but from girlish levity,
or induced by maiden prankishness to break it
afterward, she withers from the earth like a plant
plucked from the garden of the blessed, and sent to
shrivel mid the fires of the Evil One.”

“But, foolish girl, I mean not to mislead this
youth,” rejoined Alida, in the Mohawk tongue,
which, like many a lady near the border at that
time, she spoke with ease and fluency. “Is the
soul of my young friend so full of Teondetha, that
she thinks every man, like him, a lover?”

“The image of her true warrior, though ever
present to The Spreading Dew, still leaves room
for all good spirits, and their ruler, Owaneyo, to be
remembered. The brown-haired captive loves my
blue-eyed sister; and if he be no more to her than
she says, it were mockery to the spirit to bring him
here.”

“And by what means got you the idea that this
young man thinks of your friend save as a countrywoman
in captivity like himself?”

“Thou speakest with two tongues, lady; and I,
though the talk of the white man is strange to me,
can do the same. The brown-haired warrior is a
friend of the Oneidas, and can use the tongue of
Teondetha; and, even if words had not betrayed
his secret, as he implored me to look first to your
safety, lady, when you came not to the spot to
which I led him upon the opposite side of the
camp yesternight, should I not have known how it
stood with him? Doth not the breeze know why
the flower trembles when it fans it? And held I not
the captive's hand while I spoke of you, when guiding
him through the thicket's depths?”

“It is too late now, my gentle sister, to change
our place of meeting,” said Miss De Roos, who saw
that it was equally impossible to reason the girl out
of the conviction which she had lately adopted, or
the superstition which was so intimately ingrafted
with her forest faith. “I must see the youth
to-night, and upon this spot, or we must abandon
the interview altogether; and even now I hear the
sound as of some one leaping from bog to bog in
the quaking fen around us.”

The Mohawk girl hesitated no longer. Anxiety
for the fate of Teondetha's friend, wandering in
darkness amid the spongy and treacherous morass,
laced everywhere among its blind thickets with

deep and sloughy pools, urged her to spring forward
and guide him in safety to the Haunted Rock; and
in a few moments Greyslaer had penetrated the
copse of tamaracks that girdled it, and gained the
firm and broad platform whereon his mistress stood.
The Indian maiden, from considerations of delicacy
that in such matters seem common to her sex, however
uncultivated, instantly glided away; and the
lovers, if such they may be called, were left alone
together.

And now, young gallant, so lithe of foot and bold
of hand, so ready in speech and act, alike amid manhood's
councils and warrior fray, where lurks thy
smooth tongue, thy nimble wit and stout endeavour,
that have already proclaimed thee man among the
ablest of thy fellows? Why do thy knees tremble,
and thy quivering lips refuse to lackey thy laggard
thoughts to utterance? Why tak'st thou not the
outstretched hand the maid in friendliness accords
thee? Why fall thy muttered syllables like broken
drops feebly distilled from some slow-thawing fountain?
Is it the Divinity of the place that awes thee?
or doth thy spirit quail before an earthly presence?

“Greyslaer,” said Alida, solemnly, for her woman's
heart was touched by the agitation which
overwhelmed her lover, and the bright stars shining
down upon the spot revealed the paleness of his
cheek. “God! he knows that I would spare you
the pain my words may inflict to-night; I sought
this interview for a far different object from that to
which I now see that it must—that it ought, perhaps,
for your future happiness, to tend. I blame
myself in not inviting such an explanation between
us long ago. Be a man, Max Greyslaer, and shrink
not at what I am about to say. You love me?”

“To idolatry, to madness,” cried the young man,
in a hoarse whisper of passion, while his thronged

feelings, rushing tumultuously to find vent through
his lips, seemed nearly to suffocate him as he flung
himself upon his knees before Alida.

The lady recoiled against a blasted tree that grew
near by, and, overcome for a moment, could only
mutely motion to him to rise. He sprang to his feet,
and stood with folded arms before her. “Alas!
alas!” she said, at length recovering herself, “you
need not have told me that. And yet, the God of
Heaven be my judge, I dreamed not till this night
that your regard was of so deep a nature. But you
are yet young, Greyslaer; love cannot exist without
hope, and this fancy will soon pass away, or be
transferred to another more worthy of your esteem;
to one who can reciprocate your affection.”

“Yes! when the last year's stubble shall sprout
with a second spring; when that scathed tree
against which you lean shall shake off the moss
that drinks up its sap of life, and be clothed anew
with verdure of its own; when—”

“Hold, Max, hold; this is the very phrensy of
passion. I cannot listen to you longer, unless you
show some regard for my feelings by repressing the
vehemence of yours. Oh! Max Greyslaer, if you
knew how deep a cause I have for grief in which
you cannot share, you would from this moment
cease to add to my sorrows by urging this misplaced,
this most unhappy passion.”

“You unhappy, Alida?—forgive me for thus calling
you. You the victim of a secret sorrow? You,
with that smooth cheek; that rounded, pliant form;
that brow on which—no, no, the hand of grief hath
never left its wasting fingers there, nor hollow care
enshrined himself in such a tenement; you but
mock me, Alida; or, rather, you would thus, in
mercy, crush my ill-starred passion. But, Miss De

Roos, you know me not! If the presumption of
my love offend you—”

“Oh! not offend me,” tearfully murmured the afflicted
girl.

“If the madness of my love offend you,” pursued
Max, unheeding the low-voiced interruption, “you
may teach me to curb, to smother, to bury in my
inmost soul the feeling that consumes it; but there,
there it will burn for ever. The heart of Greyslaer
can know no second love.”

“This is too, too much! It will drive me mad to
speak it; yet nothing else will extinguish his unhappy
infatuation. Max Greyslaer, hear me. I
have long since given you the regard of a sister.
I have watched you alike in your studies and your
sports, with the pride and the interest of an elder
sister; and a sister's fondness would have followed,
could I have shut out the painful conviction that it
was not with the affection of a brother you regarded
me. This interest in your welfare alone would impel
me to leave no step untried to root out this fatal
passion from your heart. But since the wild avowal
of this night; since the declaration of desperate
feelings you but now betrayed, I feel, though most
innocently the cause of them, that you have still
deeper claims upon my sympathy, that you have
new ones upon my gratitude. I feel that there is
but one way to break the miserable chain by which
you would link your fate with mine, and give you
back to the higher and happier destiny for which,
by every circumstance save this one only, you are
fitted. Nay, thank me not; I acknowledge you
have a right to my confidence.” She paused, and
the features upon which the domestic sorrows of the
last few weeks had left no feeble impress, became
agitated with an expression of pain, which even the
recollection of that night of horror at the Hawksnest

had failed to trace. Greyslaer himself awaited
what was to follow; and her words, as she resumed,
were spoken in a tone low but clear, firm but inexpressibly
mournful. “There is,” she said, “there
is but one man living, Greyslaer—one as vile, sordid,
ruthless, and malignant as you are gentle, generous,
and noble—one only other who shares the
secret you have this night wrung from me.”

“And he is—”

“My husband!”

The wretched girl, whose lofty spirit was still
farther wrought up by the high and magnanimous
sentiment of generosity which sustained her for the
moment, swooned the instant she had pronounced
the words. The weakness, however, quickly passed
away, as, at a cry of alarm from Greyslaer, the
Indian maiden bounded from the covert, and applied
some cool glossy leaves, wet with the dews of night,
to the brow of the sufferer.

The blow was better received by Greyslaer than
could have been expected or hoped for by her that
dealt it. He was indeed astounded and petrified
by the first announcement; but all consideration
for himself seemed the next moment merged in
concern for his unhappy mistress.

“Lady,” he said, dropping on one knee before her,
and with an air of deep respect pressing his lips to
the hand which she did not attempt to withdraw,
“you spoke truly, lady, when you said my fate
was linked with yours; but you erred in believing
that aught could sever the chain, though it might
lead me to destruction. As a lover, after what I
have heard this night, you shall never know me
more. But you have still left me something to
live for, in taking away the only hope that could
make existence happy. You have given me back
to myself, but from this moment I am more completely

yours than ever. The romantic dream of
my youth has passed away, the madness of my
misplaced and boyish love is over; and here, by
the cool light of manhood's enfranchised reason,
here upon this planted rock, with yon bright heaven
as witness of my vow, I swear, while the pulses
of life beat within me, never to leave nor desert
you until I unravel this hideous mystery, and break
the spell in which some fiend has manacled your
soul. Nay, shrink not, dearest lady, as if my sworn
service might prove intrusive. How or why these
devilish meshes have been woven around you, I
ask you not to explain until I have in some way
approved my faith and loyalty. But be it when or
where you choose to make the revelation; be the
deed what it may, you claim in return for the precious
boon of your confidence, if human hand can
work it, it shall be done at your bidding.”

A light as from a maniac's eye glared in that
of Alida as the young man rose slowly up before
her after this wild and solemn adjuration.

“No, no, Greyslaer,” she cried, shaking back the
long tresses which had fallen in disorder over her
neck and shoulders. “No, Greyslaer, thou art not
yet dear enough to me to share the fruition of the
hoarded hope I have lived upon for years. Alida's
own hand shall alone avenge Alida! For what
else have I cherished the strength of this useless
frame; for what have I forgot my woman's nature,
and shared your schooling in feats of arms with
my brother? Think you it was an idle caprice
of my sex, or the perverted taste of an Amazon,
that made me choose pistol and rapier, instead
of needle and distaff, for my amusement? No,
Max Greyslaer; my hand, as well as my heart, hath
been schooled for years to the accomplishment of
one only end, and they will neither of them fail

me at my purpose. That is, if this poor brain hold
out.”

And, pressing both hands to her temples, the unfortunate
young lady looked so bewildered for a
moment, that Greyslaer could hardly resist the conviction
that her intellects were disordered. Yet, if
such were indeed the case, how, he thought, could
her mind be so well balanced in regard to all other
subjects? In reference to this one, too, her reason,
though disturbed, was not clouded; the agitation
of the fountain did indeed hide its depths from
view, but the water was bright and limpid still.

If it be true, however, “that great wit to madness
nearly is allied,” while gleams of insanity have
been discovered in minds which have exercised a
wide and enduring influence over mankind, and,
mastering their disease till the last, have left in
death the wisest of their survivers doubtful as to
the suspicion that has attached to them; then might
a far more experienced observer of human nature
than young Greyslaer be at fault. Nor, indeed,
were it just to conclude, only from what he had
witnessed, that the senses of Alida were deranged.
The sentiments which she had just uttered were
indeed abhorrent to the nature of her sex, to her
Christian education, and all her early associations
of refinement. But while the excitement under
which she spoke would sufficiently account for her
momentary air of wildness, there was none of the
incoherence of distraction in her speech; and as
for nature and education, the first had been shocked,
overthrown, and changed by the outrage which
trampled upon it, and the last—the last is but an
artificial barrier, that at once gives way when the
former has become perverted.

While these reflections, or others not unlike them,
passed hurriedly through the mind of Greyslaer,

the lovely subject of them seemed too busied with
her own conflicting thoughts to observe the earnest
and anxious gaze that was riveted upon her countenance.
At last, as if shaking off the load that
weighed upon her spirits, and recovering from the
attitude of dejection that for a moment bowed her
commanding form, she said, in a calm voice,

“I would, Mr. Greyslaer, that you could forget
what has passed between us this night. I have
been hasty in permitting you to commit yourself to
take an interest in my affairs which they do not
deserve at your hands. I have thought of the mischievous
consequences of yielding you a more full
and complete confidence; and it would be ungenerous
in me to claim your active sympathy for the
blind and partial revelation of my sorrows already
made. I beseech you to remember only the friendly
interest with which I requite your regard, and to
forget all else that has passed between us.”

These formal words, which struck chillingly
upon the ear of Greyslaer, were pronounced in
that measured tone of superior self-possession with
which a master-spirit may sometimes address an
inferior, blended with the air of kind authority
which considerate age will put on when conversing
with inexperienced youth. But, though she knew
it not yet, the ascendancy which the generous and
haughty-souled Alida had hitherto exercised over
the mind of her lover was gone for ever; and Greyslaer
made her feel that it was so in his reply.

“An hour ago, Miss De Roos, and I was, perhaps,
the rash and doting boy you think me. Rash
in aspiring to the hand of one so gifted as yourself,
doting in that I dared to tell you of my passion;
but though I still bear you a regard passing the
love of kindred, however near, boy I am no longer.
The day-star of my youth has set for ever; the destiny

of my life is written; for good or for evil, 'tis
henceforth twined with yours. If you repent the
share you may have had in thus determining my
fate, if it be a generous concern for my welfare
that prompted your words, your anxiety is thrown
away. It is too late for you to recede; and I—I
have thrown my cast, and am determined to stand
the hazard of the die!”

“And how,” said the lady, with an irresolute, uneasy
air, that perhaps betrayed a mingled feeling of
jealous pride, of growing self-diffidence, and newly-awakened
respect for the lofty and decided tone
the youth assumed so unexpectedly, “how, Greyslaer,
am I to avail myself of any service which you
might render me?”

“By designating the villain at whose life you
aim, and leaving me to avenge your injuries.”

“Speak you in earnest, Max Greyslaer? Do you
think me, then, capable of such ignoble and coldblooded
selfishness? so ignoble as to place my mortal
quarrel in the hands of one who is a stranger to
my blood; so selfish as to requite affection by imposing
a task that may lead to death?”

“Well spoken, young missus, like a gal of spunk
as you are,” exclaimed a harsh voice near by, while
a brawny ruffian, leaping from the thicket, and striking
the rock with a short Indian war-club as he
gained his footing upon it, placed himself between
Greyslaer and Alida. “What, ho! younker,” he
cried; “you would add to the account that is chalked
up agin you already, would you? God help you
in his own way; but, unless the devil fail wild Wat
afore then, you will find him a hard reckoner; that
is, if your carcass first escape a roasting at the hands
of the bloody Mohawk.”

“Stand off, ruffian,” muttered Greyslaer, choking
with passion, as he saw the savage-looking fellow

circling the waist of Alida with one arm, while,
weaponless and feeble from his recent wound, he
felt himself incapable of protecting her.

“Fair words, fair words, if you please, my young
master; I come here only to rescue this lady from
Indian captivity; and, as the Redskins are still my
friends in the main, I should be sorry to rob the
stake doubly by knocking you in the head.”

“Oh, Max,” murmured Alida, who had hitherto
stood as if paralyzed with horror, “strive not with
this dark and terrible man, who even now has stepped,
as from the grave, between us.”

“And so you, too, eh, my fraulein, thought, like
many others, that Red Wolfert had kicked the bucket,
because I took Wat's advice, and cleared out
for a while, to save my neck, till things should blow
over. But times have changed, my spanking lass;
tall fellows hold up their heads once more, and I
come here to exercise the rights of one of them over
Mistress—”

“Speak, speak but one word, I pray you, Alida!
Is this horrible ruffi—is this your husband?”

“Dunder und blixem, and suppose I be,” cried
the man, catching the words out of the mouth of
Alida, whose senses seemed too much benumbed
to make a ready reply. “Don't you see how the
gal wilts like when I look at her, and who but her
natural husband should make a woman cower?”

“In the name of the devil, who are you, that speak
so fitly in his tongue?” said Greyslaer, making a
wary movement toward the man, in the desperate
hope of clutching from his hand the short mace with
which he dallied.

“A clerk of St. Nicholas, who will despatch you
with a message to his employer if you move a step
nearer, verfluchter kerl.”

“If you be the fiend himself, here's at you,”

shouted Greyslaer, bounding furiously forward. The
contest was too unequal to leave a hope of success
for the invalid youth, had he succeeded in closing
with his antagonist; but the latter, to whom the now
senseless Alida seemed no encumbrance, as he actively
leaped aside, laughed to scorn the vain efforts
of his assailant, who still pressed impetuously upon
him. His words, however, betrayed his growing
irritation, as, backing step by step toward the edge
of the rock, so as still to keep the full swing of his
arm while the youth attempted to close in upon
him,

“Gemeiner hund, madcap, idiot, dolt, take that
to quiet you,” he cried, at last dealing a blow that
brought Greyslaer instantly to the ground.

Valtmeyer, for the ruffian was no other than that
redoubtable outlaw, waited not to see how durable
might be the effects of the blow, but, plunging into
the bushes, he glided along a slippery log with his
burden, thridding the morass like one accustomed
to its dangers. Stricken down, and stunned for the
moment, Greyslaer was slowly regaining his feet,
when the first object he beheld was the Mohawk
maiden, gazing, with clasped hands and bewildered
eyes, toward the thickets into which the outlaw
had disappeared. His towering form, his sallow
features, his long beard of grizzled red, and aspect
altogether foreign and hideous to her sight, made
him no unfit personification of those evil spirits of
the forest which the Indian girl would naturally
paint, as the very reverse in appearance from the
smooth-cheeked warriors of her race; and the simple
sylvan maiden, as she breathed a prayer for the
ill-fated pale sister of her sex, thought that the offended
genius of the place had permitted some fiend
to intrude within his hallowed circle, and punish on
the spot the first violation of the Haunted Rock.