I had influence with our tribes.  The Government offered me a well paid commission to act as its secret agent.  Pastor Storrs and the Williamses, who had been nurturing a missionary, were smitten with grief to see him rise and leap into camps and fields, eager for the open world, the wilderness smell; the council, where the red man’s mind, a trembling balance, could be turned by vivid language; eager, in fact, to live where history was being made.

The pastor had clothed me in his mind with ministerial gown and band, and the martial blood that quickened he counted an Iroquois strain.  Yet so inconsistent is human nature, so given to forms which it calls creeds, that when I afterwards put on the surplice and read prayers to my adopted people, he counted it as great a defection as taking to saddle and spur.  We cannot leave the expression of our lives to those better qualified than we are, however dear they may be.  I had to pack my saddlebags and be gone, loving Longmeadow none the less because I grieved it, knowing that it would not approve of me more if I stayed and failed to do my natural part.

The snuffbox and the missal which had belonged to my family in France I always carried with me.  And very little could be transported on the road we took.

John Williams, who came to Longmeadow in deerskins, and paraded his burnished red poll among the hatted Williamses, abetted me in turning from the missionary field to the arena of war, and never left me.  It was Skenedonk who served the United States with brawn and endurance, while I put such policy and color into my harangues as I could command.  We shared our meals, our camps, our beds of leaves together.  The life at Longmeadow had knit me to good use.  I could fast or feast, ride or march, take the buckskins, or the soldier’s uniform.

Of this service I shall write down only what goes to the making of the story.  The Government was pleased to commend it, and it may be found written in other annals than mine.

Great latitude was permitted us in our orders.  We spent a year in the north.  My skin darkened and toughened under exposure until I said to Skenedonk, “I am turning an Indian;” and he, jealous of my French blood, denied it.

In July we had to thread trails he knew by the lake toward Sandusky.  There was no horse path wide enough for us to ride abreast.  Brush swished along our legs, and green walls shut our view on each side.  The land dipped towards its basin.  Buckeye and gigantic chestnut trees, maple and oak, passed us from rank to rank of endless forest.  Skenedonk rode ahead, watching for every sign and change, as a pilot now watches the shifting of the current.  So we had done all day, and so we were doing when fading light warned us to camp.

A voice literally cried out of the wilderness, startling the horses and ringing among the tree trunks: 

“The spirit of the Lord is upon me, and He hath anointed me to blow the trumpet in the wilderness, and sound an alarm in the forest; for behold the tribes of the heathen are round about your doors, and a devouring flame followeth after them!”