At this point, Solomon Binkus paused to give his words a chance “to sink in.”  The silence which followed was broken only by the crack of burning faggots and the sound of the night wind in the tall pines above the gorge.  Before Mr. Binkus resumes his narrative, which, one might know by the tilt of his head and the look of his wide open, right eye, would soon happen, the historian seizes the opportunity of finishing his introduction.  He had been the best scout in the army of Sir Jeffrey Amherst.  As a small boy he had been captured by the Senecas and held in the tribe a year and two months.  Early in the French and Indian War, he had been caught by Algonquins and tied to a tree and tortured by hatchet throwers until rescued by a French captain.  After that his opinion of Indians had been, probably, a bit colored by prejudice.  Still later he had been a harpooner in a whale boat, and in his young manhood, one of those who had escaped the infamous massacre at Fort William Henry when English forces, having been captured and disarmed, were turned loose and set upon by the savages.  He was a tall, brawny, broad-shouldered, homely-faced man of thirty-eight with a Roman nose and a prominent chin underscored by a short sandy throat beard.  Some of the adventures had put their mark upon his weathered face, shaven generally once a week above the chin.  The top of his left ear was missing.  There was a long scar upon his forehead.  These were like the notches on the stock of his rifle.  They were a sign of the stories of adventure to be found in that wary, watchful brain of his.

Johnson enjoyed his reports on account of their humor and color and he describes him in a letter to Putnam as a man who “when he is much interested, looks as if he were taking aim with his rifle.”  To some it seemed that one eye of Mr. Binkus was often drawing conclusions while the other was engaged with the no less important function of discovery.

His companion was young Jack Irons—­a big lad of seventeen, who lived in a fertile valley some fifty miles northwest of Fort Stanwix, in Tryon County, New York.  Now, in September, 1768, they were traveling ahead of a band of Indians bent on mischief.  The latter, a few days before, had come down Lake Ontario and were out in the bush somewhere between the lake and the new settlement in Horse Valley.  Solomon thought that they were probably Hurons, since they, being discontented with the treaty made by the French, had again taken the war-path.  This invasion, however, was a wholly unexpected bit of audacity.  They had two captives—­the wife and daughter of Colonel Hare, who had been spending a few weeks with Major Duncan and his Fifty-Fifth Regiment, at Oswego.  The colonel had taken these ladies of his family on a hunting trip in the bush.  They had had two guides with them, one of whom was Solomon Binkus.  The men had gone out in the early evening after moose and imprudently left the ladies in camp,