“I see you are all English,” said he, “though some of you wear blue coats.  These we may perhaps adopt into our tribe, for our boys grow up but slowly, and some of the blue coats are good fighters.  These dogs of Illini we shall of course burn.  As for your war house, you will no longer need it, since you are now friends of the Iroquois, and are going to their villages.  You may say to Corlaer that you well know the Iroquois have no prisoners.”

The horrid significance of this threat was all too soon made plain.  In an hour the little stockade was but a mass of embers and ashes.  In another hour the little valley had become a Gehenna of anguish and lamentations, with whose riot of grief and woe there mingled the savage exultations of a foe whose treachery was but surpassed by his cruelty.  Again the planting-ground of the Illini was utterly laid waste, to mark it naught remaining but trampled grain, and heaps of ashes, and remnants of blackened and incinerated bones.  By nightfall the party of prisoners had begun a wild journey through the wilderness, whose horrors surpassed any they had supposed to be humanly endurable.

Day after day, week after week, for more than a month, and much of the time in winter weather, they toiled on, part of the way by boat, the remainder of the journey on foot, crossing snow-clogged forest, and tangled thicket and frozen morass, yet daring not to drop out for rest, since to lag might mean to die.  It was as though after some frightful nightmare of suffering and despair that at length they reached the villages of the Five Nations, located far to the east, at the foot of the great waterway which Law and his family had ascended more than a year before.

Yet if that which had gone before seemed like some bitter dream, surely the day of awakening promised but little better hope.  From village to village, footsore and ill, they were hurried without rest, at each new stopping place the central figures of a barbarous triumph; and nowhere did they meet the representatives of either the French or the English government, whose expected presence had constituted their one ground of hope.

“Where is your big peace?” asked Teganisoris of Pembroke.  “Where are the head men of Corlaer?  Who brings presents to the Iroquois, and who is to tell us that Onontio has carried the pipe of peace to Corlaer?  Here are our villages as when we left them, and here again are we, save for the absent ones who have been killed by your young men.  It is no wonder that my people are displeased.”

Indeed those of the Iroquois who had remained at home clamored continually that some of the prisoners should be given over to them.  Thus, in doubt, uncertainty and terror the party passed through the villages, moving always eastward, until at length they arrived at the fortified town where Teganisoris made his home, a spot toward the foot of Lake Ontario, and not widely removed from that stupendous cataract which, from the beginning of earth, had uplifted its thunderous diapason here in the savage wilderness—­Ontoneagrea, object of superstitious awe among all the tribes.