"I have seen the Iroquois at the Sacandaga Vlaie. I saw Walter Butler there, too; and the woods were alive with Johnson's Greens. The only reason why they have not struck you here is, no doubt, because there was more plunder and more killing to be had along the Sacandaga. But when there remain no settlements there--when villages, towns, hamlets are in ashes, like Currietown, like Minnesink, Cherry Valley, Wyoming, Caughnawaga, then they'll turn their hatchets on these lone farms, these straggling hamlets and cross-road taverns. I tell you, to-day there is not a house unburned at Caughnawaga, except the church and that villain Doxtader's house--not a chimney standing in the Mohawk Valley, from Tribes Hill to the Nose. Ten miles of houses in ashes, ten miles of fields a charred trail!
"Now, do as you please, but remember. For surely as I stand here the militia call has already gone out, and this country must remain exposed while we follow Butler and try to hunt him down."
The little throng of people, scarcely a dozen in all, received my warning in silence. Glancing down the road, I saw one or two women standing at their house doors, and children huddled at the gate, all intently watching us.
"I want to send a message to Colonel Willett," I said, turning to the Oneida. "Can you go? Now?"
The tireless fellow smiled.
"Give us what you have to eat," I said to Patrick Farris, whose round and rosy little wife had already laid the board in the big room inside. And presently we sat down to samp, apple-sauce, and bread, with a great bowl of fresh milk to each cover.
The Oneida ate sparingly; the girl mechanically, dull eyes persistently lowered. From the first moment that the Oneida had seen her he had never addressed a single word to her, nor had he, after the first keen glance, even looked at her. This, in the stress of circumstances, the forced and hasty marches, the breathless trail, the tension of the Thendara situation, was not extraordinary. But after excitement and fatigue, and when together under the present conditions, two Iroquois would certainly speak together.
Anxious, preoccupied as I was, I could not help but notice how absolutely the Oneida ignored the girl; and I knew that he regarded her as an Oneida invariably regards a woman no longer respected by the most chaste of all people, the Iroquois nation.
That she understood and passionately resented this was perfectly plain to me, though she neither spoke nor moved. There was nothing for me to do or say. Already I had argued the matter with myself from every standpoint, and eagerly as I sought for solace, for a ray of hope, I could not but understand how vain it were to ask a cynical world to believe that this young girl was Walter Butler's wife. No; with his denial, with the averted faces of the sachems on the Kennyetto, as she herself had admitted, with the denial of Sir John, what evidence could be brought forward to justify me in wedding Elsin Grey? Another thing: even if Sir John should admit that, acting in capacity of a magistrate of Tryon County, he had witnessed the marriage of Walter Butler and Lyn Montour, what civil powers had a deposed magistrate; a fugitive who had broken parole and fled?