Not a shot had yet been fired; there was no sound save the excited and terrifying roar of a vast armed mob obliterating in its fury the very well-springs that enabled its enemies to exist.

Cattle, sheep, horses were being driven off down the trail by which we had come; men everywhere were stuffing their empty sacks with green vegetables and household plunder; the town fairly whistled with flame, and the smoke rose in a great cloud-shape very high, and hung above us, tenting us from the sun.

In the midst of this uproar the Grey-Feather came speeding to me with news that the enemy was a little way upstream and seemed inclined to make a stand.  I immediately informed the General; and soon the bugle-horns of the light infantry sounded, and away we raced ahead of them.

I remember seeing an entire company marching with muskmelons pinned on their bayonets, all laughing and excited; and I heard General Sullivan bawl at them: 

“You damned unmilitary rascals, do you mean to open fire on ’em with vegetables?”

Everybody was laughing, and the General grinned as Hand’s bugle-horns played us in.

But it was another matter when the Seneca rifles cracked, and a sergeant and a drummer lad of the 11th Pennsylvania fell.  The smooth-bores cracked again, and four more soldiers tumbled forward sprawling, the melons on their bayonets rolling off into the bushes.

Carbury, marching forward beside me, dropped across my path; and as I stooped over him gave me a ghastly look.

“Don’t let them scalp me,” he said—­ but his own men came running and picked him up, and I ran forward with the others toward a wooded hill where puffs of smoke spotted the bushes.

Then the long, rippling volleys of Hand’s men crashed out, one after another, and after a little of this their bugle-horns sounded the charge.

But the Senecas did not wait; and it was like chasing weasels in a stone wall, for even my Indians could not come up with them.

However, about two o’clock, returning to that part of the town across the river, which Colonel Dearborn’s men were now setting afire, we received a smart volley from some ambushed Senecas, and Adjutant Huston and a guide fell.

It was here that the Sagamore made his kill—­ just beyond the first house, in some alders; and he came back with a Seneca scalp at his girdle, as did the Grey-Feather also.

“Hiokatoo’s warriors,” remarked the Oneida briefly, wringing out his scalp and tying it to his belt.

I looked up at the hills in sickened silence.  Doubtless Butler’s men were watching us in our work of destruction, not daring to interfere until the regulars arrived from Fort Niagara.  But when they did arrive, it meant a battle.  We all knew that.  And knew, too, that a battle lost in the heart of that dark wilderness meant the destruction of every living soul among us.

About two o’clock, having eaten nothing except what green and uncooked stuff we had picked up in field and garden, our marching signal sounded and we moved off; driving our captured stock, every soldier laden with green food and other plunder, and taking with us our dead and wounded.