Among the captives was Mary Rowlandson, the minister’s wife, who afterward wrote the story of her sad experiences.  The treatment of the prisoners varied with the caprice or the cupidity of the captors.  Those for whom a substantial ransom might be expected fared comparatively well; to others death came as a welcome relief.  One poor woman with a child in her arms was too weak to endure the arduous tramp over the icy hillsides, and begged to be left behind, till presently the savages lost their patience.  They built a fire, and after a kind of demon dance killed mother and child with a club and threw the bodies into the flames.  Such treatment may seem exceptionally merciful, but those modern observers who best know the Indian’s habits say that he seldom indulges in torture except when he has abundance of leisure and a mind quite undisturbed.  He is an epicure in human agony and likes to enjoy it in long slow sips.  It is for the end of the march that the accumulation of horrors is reserved; the victims by the way are usually despatched quickly; and in the case of Mrs. Rowlandson’s captors their irregular and circuitous march indicates that they were on the alert.  Their movements seem to have covered much of the ground between Wachusett mountain and the Connecticut river.  They knew that the white squaw of the great medicine man of an English village was worth a heavy ransom, and so they treated Mrs. Rowlandson unusually well.  She had been captured when escaping from the burning house, carrying in her arms her little six-year-old daughter.  She was stopped by a bullet that grazed her side and struck the child.  The Indian who seized them placed the little girl upon a horse, and as the dreary march began she kept moaning “I shall die, mamma.”  “I went on foot after it,” says the mother, “with sorrow that cannot be expressed.  At length I took it off the horse, and carried it in my arms till my strength failed me, and I fell down with it ....  After this it quickly began to snow, and when night came on they stopped.  And now down I must sit in the snow, by a little fire, and a few boughs behind me, with my sick child in my lap, and calling much for water, being now, through the wound, fallen into a violent fever ....  Oh, may I see the wonderful power of God that my spirit did not utterly sink under my affliction; still the Lord upheld me with his gracious and merciful spirit.”  The little girl soon died.  For three months the weary and heartbroken mother was led about the country by these loathsome savages, of whose habits and manners she gives a vivid description.  At first their omnivorousness astonished her.  “Skunks and rattlesnakes, yea the very bark of trees” they esteemed as delicacies.  “They would pick up old bones and cut them in pieces at the joints, ... then boil them and drink up the liquor, and then beat the great ends of them in a mortar and so eat them.”  After some weeks of starvation Mrs. Rowlandson herself was fain to partake of such viands.