“Listen,” said the boy, as a second note answered the first; “do you hear that?”

“Yes,” was the reply, and, after a few moments’ silence, “do you not hear a rustling among the branches of the tree yonder?”

“Perhaps it is a squirrel—­but look! what is that?  Surely I saw something red among the branches.  It looked like a fawn popping up its head.”

At this moment, the children, who had been gazing so intently in the direction of the fallen tree that all other objects were forgotten, felt themselves seized from behind and pinioned in an iron grasp.  What were their horror and dismay to find themselves in the arms of savages, whose terrific countenances and gestures plainly showed them to be enemies!

They made signs to the children to be silent, on pain of death, and hurried them off, half dead with terror, in a direction leading from their father’s habitation.  After travelling some distance in profound silence, the severity of their captors somewhat relaxed, and as night approached the party halted, after adopting the usual precautions to secure themselves against a surprise.

In an agony of uncertainty and terror, torn from their beloved home and parents, and anticipating all the horrors with which the rumors of the times had invested a captivity among the Indians—­perhaps even a torturing death—­the poor children could no longer restrain their grief, but gave vent to sobs and lamentations.

Their distress appeared to excite the compassion of one of the party, a man of mild aspect, who approached and endeavored to soothe them.  He spread them a couch of the long grass which grew near the encamping-place, offered them a portion of his own stock of dried meat and parched corn, and gave them to understand by signs that no farther evil was intended them.

These kindly demonstrations were interrupted by the arrival of another party of the enemy, bringing with them the mother of the little prisoners, with her youngest child, an infant of three months old.

It had so happened that the father of the family, with his serving-men, had gone early in the day to a raising at a few miles’ distance, and the house had thus been left without a defender.  The long period of tranquillity which they had enjoyed, free from all molestation or alarm from the savages, had thrown the settlers quite off their guard, and they had recently laid aside some of the caution they had formerly deemed necessary.

These Indians, by lying in wait, had found the favorable moment for seizing the defenceless family and making them prisoners.  Judging from their paint, and other marks by which the early settlers learned to distinguish the various tribes, Mrs. Lytle conjectured that those into whose hands she and her children had fallen were Senecas.  Nor was she mistaken.  It was a party of that tribe who had descended from their village with the intention of falling upon some isolated band of their enemies, the Delawares, but failing in this, had made themselves amends by capturing a few white settlers.