Chemung had been, but was no longer.  And if, like Thendara, it was ever again to be I do not know, only that such a horrid and pitiful desolation I had never witnessed in all my life before.  For it was not the enemy, but the innocent earth we had mutilated, stamping an armed heel into its smiling and upturned face.  And what we had done sickened me.

Yet, this was scarcely the beginning of that terrible punishment which was to pass through the Long House in flame and smoke, from the Eastern Door to the Door of the West, scouring it fiercely from one end to the other, and leaving no living thing within—­ only a few dead men prone among its blood-soaked ashes.

Etho ni-ya-wenonh!

[Thus it befell!]

By six that evening the army was back in its camp at Tioga Point.  All the fever and excitement of the swift foray had passed, and the inevitable reaction had set in.  The men were haggard, weary, sombre, and harassed.  There was no elation after success either among officers or privates; only a sullen grimness, the sullenness of repletion after an orgy—­ the grimness of disgust for an unwelcome duty only yet begun.

Because this sturdy soldiery was largely composed of tillers of the soil, of pioneer farmers who understood good land, good husbandry, good crops, and the stern privations necessary to wrest a single rod of land from the iron jaws of the wilderness.

To stamp upon, burn, girdle, destroy, annihilate, give back to the forest what human courage and self-denial had wrested from it, was to them in their souls abhorrent.

Save for the excitement of the chase, the peril ever present, the certainty that failure meant death in its most dreadful forms, it might have been impossible for these men to destroy the fruits of the earth, even though produced by their mortal enemies, and designed, ultimately, to nourish them.

Even my Indians sat silent and morose, stretching, braiding, and hooping their Seneca scalps.  And I heard them conversing among themselves, mentioning frequently the Three Sisters* they had destroyed; and they spoke ever with a hint of tenderness and regret in their tones which left me silent and unhappy.

[Corn, squash, and bean were so spoken of affectionately, as they always were planted together by the Iroquois.]

To slay in the heat and fury of combat is one matter; to scar and cripple the tender features of humanity’s common mother is a different affair.  And I make no doubt that every blow that bit into the laden fruit trees of Chemung stabbed more deeply the men who so mercilessly swung the axes.

Well might the great Cayuga chieftain repeat the terrible prophecy of Toga-na-etah the Beautiful: 

“When the White Throats shall come, then, if ye be divided, ye will pull down the Long House, fell the tall Tree of Peace, and quench the Onondaga Fire forever.”

As I stood by the rushing current of the Thiohero,* on the profaned and desolate threshold of the Dark Empire, I thought of O-cau-nee, the Enchantress, and of Na-wenu the Blessed, and of Hiawatha floating in his white canoe into the far haven where the Master of Life stood waiting.