“Do you notice what they are about?” said I sourly.  “Even here within whisper of the fort?”

“Are you not happy to see me, Euan?” she cooed close to my ear.

“Not here; inside that log curtain yonder.”

“But there is a dragon yonder,” she whispered, with mischief adorable in her sparkling eyes; then slipped hastily beyond my reach, saying:  “Oh, Euan!  Forget not our vows, but let our conduct remain seemly still, else I return.”

I had no choice, for we were now passing our inner pickets, where a line of bush-huts, widely set, circled the main camp.  There were some few people wandering along this line—­ officers, servants, boatmen, soldiers off duty, one or two women.

Just within the lines there was a group of people from which a fiddle sounded; and I saw Boyd and Lana turn thither; and we followed them.

Coming up to see who was making such scare-crow music, Lana said in a low voice to us: 

“It’s an old, old man—­ more than a hundred years old, he tells us—­ who has lived on the Ouleout undisturbed among the Indians until yesterday, when we burnt the village.  And now he has come to us for food and protection.  Is it not pitiful?”

I had a hard dollar in my pouch, and went to him and offered it.  Boyd had Continental money, and gave him a handful.

He was not very feeble, this ancient creature, yet, except among Indians who live sometimes for more than a hundred years, I think I never before saw such an aged visage, all cracked into a thousand wrinkles, and his little, bluish eyes peering out at us through a sort of film.

To smile, he displayed his shrivelled gums, then picked up his fiddle with an agility somewhat surprising, and drew the bow harshly, saying in his cracked voice that he would, to oblige us, sing for us a ballad made in 1690; and that he himself had ridden in the company of horse therein described, being at that time thirteen years of age.

And Lord!  But it was a doleful ballad, yet our soldiers listened, fascinated, to his squeaking voice and fiddle; and I saw the tears standing in Lois’s eyes, and Lana’s lips a-quiver.  As for Boyd, he yawned, and I most devoutly wished us all elsewhere, yet lost no word of his distressing tale: 

  “God prosper long our King and Queen,
    Our lives and safeties all;
  A sad misfortune once there did
    Schenectady befall.

  “From forth the woods of Canady
    The Frenchmen tooke their way,
  The people of Schenectady
    To captivate and slay.

  “They march for two and twenty daies,
    All thro’ ye deepest snow;
  And on a dismal winter night
    They strucke ye cruel blow.

  “The lightsome sunne that rules the day
    Had gone down in the West;
  And eke the drowsie villagers
    Had sought and found their reste.

  “They thought they were in safetie all,
    Nor dreamt not of the foe;
  But att midnight they all swoke
    In wonderment and woe.