“Rannock’s.”

“A path to find it?”

“A sheep walk only.  Rannock is dead.  The destructives murdered him when they burned Cherry Valley.  Mrs. Rannock brings us eggs and milk.”

I walked on and entered the smoky barracks, and the first thing I saw was a pair o’ scalps, stretched and hooped, a-dangling from the rafters.

Doubtless, Murphy and Elerson meant to sew them to their bullet pouches when cured and painted.  And there was one reckless fellow in my company who wore a baldrick fringed with Shawanese scalps; but as these same Shawanese had murdered his father, mother, grandmother, and three little brothers, no officer rebuked him, although it was a horrid and savage trophy; but if the wearing of it were any comfort to him I do not know.

I looked closely at the ornamented scalps, despite my repugnance.  They were not Mohawk, not Cayuga, nor Onondaga.  Nor did they seem to me like Seneca, being not oiled and braided clean, but tagged at the root with the claws of a tree-lynx.  They were not Oneida, not Lenape.  Therefore, they must be Seneca scalps.  Which meant that Walter Butler and that spawn of satan, Sayanquarata, were now prowling around our outer pickets.  For the ferocious Senecas and their tireless war-chief, Sayanquarata, were Butler’s people; the Mohawks and Joseph Brant holding the younger Butler in deep contempt for the cruelty he did practice at Cherry Valley.

Suddenly a shaft of fear struck me like a swift arrow in the breast, as I thought of Butler and of his Mountain Snakes, and of that mad child, Lois, a-gypsying whither her silly inclination led her; and Death in the forest-dusk watching her with a hundred staring eyes.

“This time,” I muttered, “I shall put a stop to all her forest-running!” And, at the thought, I turned and passed swiftly through the doorway, across the thronged parade, out of the gate.

Hastening my pace along the Lake Road, meeting many people at first, then fewer, then nobody at all, I presently crossed the first little brook that feeds the Stoney-Kill, leaping from stone to stone.  Here in the woods lay the Oneida camp.  I saw some squaws there sewing.

The sheep walk branched a dozen yards beyond, running northward through what had been a stump field.  It was already grown head-high in weeds and wild flowers, and saplings of bird-cherry, which spring up wherever fire has passed.  A few high corn-stalks showed what had been planted there a year ago.

After a few moments following the path, I found that the field ended abruptly, and the solid walls of the forest rose once more like green cliffs towering on every side.  And at their base I saw a house of logs, enclosed within a low brush fence, and before it a field of brush.