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At dawn we three were afield, nosing the Sacandaga trail to count the tracks leading to the north the dread footprints of light, swift feet which must return one day bringing to the Mohawk Valley an awful reckoning. At noon we returned. I wrote out my report and gave it to Sir George. We spoke little together. I did not see Magdalen Brant again until they bade me adieu.
Farther still to the northward stretched the Vale and silvery Sacandaga with its pretty Fish House settlement now in ashes; and Summer House Point and Fonda's Bush were but heaps of cinders, too, the brave Broadalbin yeomen prisoners, their women and children fled to Johnstown, save old man Stoner and his boys, and that Tory villain Charlie Cady who went off with Sir John.
Is it not time that the Mohawks listen to the reading of those ancient belts, and count their dishonoured dead with brookside pebbles from the headwaters of the Sacandaga to the Delaware Capes?" "Can squirrels count?" retorted Mayaro disdainfully. "Does my white brother understand what the blue-jays say one to another in the yellowing October woods?
I think I'm the only one of the crew she dragged at her heels who hasn't forgot about things and gone off after other game; some of them have been lashed to the burning stake of pretty uncomfortable domesticity, too. As for me well, I've simply gone on caring, and I think I shall always go on. Does she know it? Of course she knows it; always has known it, ever since that first summer at Sacandaga.
Beyond them, at the Burris Farm, we passed our outlying pickets Irregular Riflemen from the Scoharie and Sacandaga, tall, lean, wiry men, whose leaf-brown rifle-dress so perfectly blended with the tree-trunks that we were aware of them only when they halted us. And, Lord!
There is a death-maul painted below in black; it shows how she was killed." He laid the scalp back very carefully. Under the mass of hair a bit of paper stuck out, and I drew it from the dreadful packet. It was a sealed letter directed to General St. Leger, and I opened and read the contents aloud in the midst of a terrible silence. "SACANDAGA VLAIE, August 17, 1777 "General Barry St. Leger
Do you think it possible for these blood-drunk ruffians to roam the Mohawk and Sacandaga valleys and respect you and yours just because you say you are neutral? Turn loose a pack of famished panthers in a common pasture and mark your sheep with your device and see how many are alive at daybreak!" "Dammy, sir!" cried Sir Lupus, "the enemy are led by British gentlemen."
We filed off due west, Murphy and Mount striding in the lead, the noise of the river below us on our left. A few rods and we swung south, then west into a wretched stump-road, which Sir George said was the Mayfield road and part of the Sacandaga trail. The roar of the Kennyetto accompanied us, then for a while was lost in the swaying murmur of the pines.
West and south the wet bones of the Sacandaga lie; and south-east you're up against the Great Vlaie and Frenchman's Creek and Sir William's remains from Guy Park on the Mohawk to the Fish House and all that bally Revolutionary tommy-rot." And as he blandly drew in his horses beside the porch: "Look who's here!
"There's a soldier, sir!" said Major Drummond, emphasizing his words with a smart blow of his riding-cane on his polished quarter-boots. "He's had us on a dog-trot since we started; up hill, down dale, across the cursed Sacandaga swamps, through fords chin-high! By gad, sir! allow me to tell you that nothing stopped us!
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