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The militia that had been ordered to the Pequot war refused to march, because she had proclaimed their chaplain to be "under a covenant of works, and not under a covenant of grace." Her influence, and not her ballot, if she had one, threatened anarchy in the state, and caused a schism in the church such as might have crushed out the life from the infant body to which Paul was writing.
They could then march across the country about forty miles, and, approaching the Pequot forts in the night and through the forest, could attack them by surprise. On Friday, the 19th of May, the expedition sailed from the mouth of the Connecticut.
North of the Pequots, the squalid villages of the Nipmucks were scattered over the beautiful highlands that stretch in long ridges from Quinsigamond to Nichewaug, and beyond toward blue Monadnock. Westward, in the lower Connecticut valley, lived the Mohegans, a small but valiant tribe, now for some time held tributary to their Pequot cousins, and very restive under the yoke.
At a short distance from them there was another still more formidable fort filled with fierce Pequot warriors, where Sassacus himself commanded. Thus, even in this hour of signal victory, starvation and ruin stared them in the face. The officers met together in anxious consultation.
As Arundel pursued his lonely way, he kept running over in his mind the events of the day before, and of the past night. He admired the sagacity and courage of the Pequot Sachem, who, assisted either by his own men, or friendly Aberginians, had been able to take a bloody revenge for the attempt on his life.
The next year Massachusetts submitted a plan of union, but Connecticut demurred because it permitted a mere majority of the federal commissioners to decide questions. Thereupon Massachusetts injected the boundary question into the discussions, and proposed an article not relished by Connecticut, that the Pequot River should be the line between the two jurisdictions.
The force of the blow threw the stooping savage upon his back, and before he could rise, the tomahawk, caught from the ground by the hand of the Pequot, crashed into the brain of the dying traitor. Drawing out, then, the knife, the Pequot, with a rapid turn that indicated a practised hand, passed it round the head of his foe, and tearing off the bloody trophy, hung it at his girdle.
"Do you think," he cried to Roebuck, "the blood of those five hundred men drowned in the Pequot mine is not on your hands your head? You, who ordered John Wilkinson to suppress the competition the Pequot was giving you, ordered him in such a way that he knew the alternative was his own ruin?
One day, at noon, it was reported to Captain Mason that they had almost reached the village of Mystic. The troops were gathered in the thick woods, in a little valley, which shut them off from the inquisitive eyes of the Pequot scouts. It was a cold, unpleasant day, and a fierce storm was raging, which drove the sharp, icy flakes into the faces of the men as they moved forward.
This expedition burnt the Indian wigwams and cornfields on Block Island, and also in the Pequot country near the mouth of the Pequot, or Thames, River; and Captain Endecott and his soldiers came to Saybrook Port and made that place their headquarters, "to my great grief," said Gardiner, "for you come hither to raise these wasps about my ears and then you will take wing and flee away."
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