But great as were their difficulties and sufferings, their faith and resolution never failed; and when the Mayflower again set sail for England, not one of the fifty emigrants who remained expressed a desire to return.

CHAPTER III.

’What men were they?  Of dark-brown color,
With sunny redness; wild of eye; their tinged brows
So smooth, as never yet anxiety
Nor busy thought had made a furrow there.
. . . . . . .  Soon the courteous guise
Of men, not purporting nor fearing ill,
Won confidence:  their wild distrustful looks
Assumed a milder meaning.  Madoc.

We have said that the band of the exiles was reduced to half the number that had, six months before, left the shores of Europe, so full of hope and of holy resolution; and still, in spite of all their outward trials and difficulties, the hope and the resolution of the survivors were as high and as firm as ever.  They trusted in the God whom they had served so faithfully; and they knew that, in his own good time, he would give them deliverance.  But their days of darkness were not yet over.  The inclemency of the winter had indeed passed away, and the face of nature began to smile upon them; yet sickness still prevailed, and the many graves that rose on the spot which they had chosen for a burial ground, daily reminded them of the losses that almost every family had already sustained.  The grief that had thus been brought upon them by death was also greatly aggravated by the harassing attacks of the Indians, who Were evidently still lurking in the neighboring woods; and who now frequently came in small parties, and committed depredations of every kind that lay in their power.  Their real but concealed object was to capture Rodolph, either alive or dead; for nothing short of his destruction, or at least that of some member of his family, could satisfy the bereaved Chief for the loss of his son.  He, therefore, left a party of his bravest and most subtle warriors in an encampment about a day’s journey from the Christian village, with orders to make frequent visits to the settlement, and leave no means untried which either force or cunning could suggest, that might lead to the full gratification of his revenge.

The old Chief himself returned to his wigwams, which lay some distance from New Plymouth, near the burial ground where the ’first encounter ’had taken place.  The detachment was left under the command end guidance of Coubitant, the young warrior who had stood by him to the last in the conflict at the village; and who was, since the death of Tisquantum’s son, regarded as the most distinguished of the young braves of that part of the tribe over which the Sachem ruled.  His cunning, and his ferocious courage, well fitted him for the task assigned to him; and as the young warrior who fell at ’the first encounter’ had been his chosen friend and companion in arms, his own desire for vengeance was only second to that of the Chief; and the malignant gaze which he had fixed on Rodolph when he led Tisquantum from the field, well expressed the feelings and the determination of his heart.