of hunger, had tried to kill her companion that she might eat her.  When Cornstalk’s party perpetrated the massacre of the Clendennins during Pontiac’s war (see Stewart’s Narrative), Mrs. Clendennin likewise left her baby to its death, and made her escape; her husband had previously been killed and his bloody scalp tied across her jaws as a gag.] The man who daily imperilled his own life, would, if water was needed in the fort, send his wife and daughter to draw it from the spring round which he knew Indians lurked, trusting that the appearance of the women would make the savages think themselves undiscovered, and that they would therefore defer their attack. [Footnote:  As at the siege of Bryan’s Station.] Such people were not likely to spare their red-skinned foes.  Many of their friends, who had never hurt the savages in any way, had perished the victims of wanton aggression.  They themselves had seen innumerable instances of Indian treachery.  They had often known the chiefs of a tribe to profess warm friendship at the very moment that their young men were stealing and murdering.  They grew to think of even the most peaceful Indians as merely sleeping wild beasts, and while their own wrongs were ever vividly before them, they rarely heard of or heeded those done to their foes.  In a community where every strong courageous man was a bulwark to the rest, he was sure to be censured lightly for merely killing a member of a loathed and hated race.

Many of the best of the backwoodsmen were Bible-readers, but they were brought up in a creed that made much of the Old Testament, and laid slight stress on pity, truth, or mercy.  They looked at their foes as the Hebrew prophets looked at the enemies of Israel.  What were the abominations because of which the Canaanites were destroyed before Joshua, when compared with the abominations of the red savages whose lands they, another chosen people, should in their turn inherit?  They believed that the Lord was king for ever and ever, and they believed no less that they were but obeying His commandment as they strove mightily to bring about the day when the heathen should have perished out of the land; for they had read in The Book that he was accursed who did the work of the Lord deceitfully, or kept his sword back from blood.  There was many a stern frontier zealot who deemed all the red men, good and bad, corn ripe for the reaping.  Such a one rejoiced to see his fellows do to the harmless Moravians as the Danites once did to the people of Laish, who lived quiet and secure, after the manner of the Sidonians, and had no business with any man, and who yet were smitten with the edge of the sword, and their city burnt with fire.

    The Moravians Themselves not Blameless.