Back sped Tahoontowhee to hasten the troops; I ran forward with Captain Carbury and the Sagamore, passing several outlying huts, then some barns and houses which loomed huge as medieval castles in the fog, but were really very small.

“Look out!” cried Carbury.  “There is their town right ahead!”

It lay straight ahead of us, a fine town of over a hundred houses built on both sides of the pretty river.  The casements of some of these houses were glazed and the roofs shingled; smoke drifted lazily from the chimneys; and all around were great open fields of grain, maize, and hay, orchards and gardens, in which were ripening peas, beans, squashes, pumpkins, watermelons, muskmelons.

“Good God!” said I.  “This is a fine place, Carbury!”

“It’s like a dozen others we have laid in ashes,” said he, “and like scores more that we shall treat in a like manner.  Look sharp!  Here some our light troops.”

The light infantry of Hand arrived on a smart run—­ a torrent of red-faced, sweating, excited fellows, pouring headlong into the town, cheering as they ran.

General Hand, catching sight of me, signalled with his sword and shouted to know what had become of the enemy.

“They’re gone off!” I shouted back.  “My Indians are on their heels and we’ll soon have news of their whereabouts.”

Then the soldiery began smashing in doors and windows right and left, laughing and swearing, and dragging out of the houses everything they contained.

So precipitate had been the enemy’s flight that they had left everything—­ food still cooking, all their household and personal utensils; and I saw in the road great piles of kettles, plates, knives, deerskins, beaver-pelts, bearhides, packs of furs, and bolts of striped linen, to which heaps our soldiers were adding every minute.

Others came to fire the town; and it was sad to see these humble homes puff up in a cloud of smoke and sparks, then burst into vivid flame.  In the orchards our men were plying their axes or girdling the heavily-fruited trees; field after field of grain was fired, and the flames swept like tides across them.

The corn was in the milk, and what our men could not burn, using the houses for kilns, they trampled and cut with their hangers—­ whole regiments marching through these fields, destroying the most noble corn I ever saw, for it was so high that it topped the head of a man on horseback.

So high, also, stood the hay, and it was sad to see it burn.

And now, all around in this forest paradise, our army was gathered, destroying, raging, devastating the fairest land that I had seen in many a day.  All the country was aflame; smoke rolled up, fouling the blue sky, burying woodlands, blotting out the fields and streams.

From the knoll to which I had moved to watch the progress of my scouts, I could see an entire New Jersey regiment chasing horses and cattle; another regiment piling up canoes, fish-weirs, and the hewn logs of bridges, to make a mighty fire; still other regiments trampling out the last vestige of green stuff in the pretty gardens.