Conducting their prisoners, the party returned to the block-house, where a court-martial was speedily formed, to decide upon the fate of Walter Butler.
He listened in sullen silence to the arguments, smiling ferociously when different acts of his cruelty were cited, and exhibiting a callous unconcern, which was the effect of desperation rather than manly courage.
He was sentenced to be hung as a spy at daylight, and when the court-martial broke up, was placed in rigid confinement during the few hours which must elapse before his death. After his removal, Colonel Wesson debated the validity of their sentence, and deemed it more prudent to grant the prisoner a reprieve, and have him removed to Albany, where the Commander-in-chief might control his fate. This was received with disfavor by the Whigs, but Wesson’s arguments finally prevailed, and it was decided that instead of meeting his sentence at daybreak he should be conveyed at once, under a strong guard, to Albany.
The old Tory, Shoemaker, was condemned to receive a score of lashes, and left to return home. Sim listened to the sentence with the utmost glee, and made strange confusion amid the solemnity of the scene, by offering to apply the lashes with his own hand.
When morning dawned, Walter Butler was sent forth from the settlement a prisoner. For once his cruel schemes had failed; and as he possessed only the courage of a weak, wicked man, he looked forward, with inward trembling, to the doom that awaited him.
For a year he pined in the close confinement of a jail; at the expiration of that time he was reported ill, and through the intercession of his father’s friends among the patriots, he was still closely watched, but allowed more liberty of action, and surrounded by the comforts and luxuries which his sensuous nature found so essential, in spite of the training and capability for enduring hardships, which a long residence in the backwoods had given him.
CHAPTER XIX
THE WIFE’S STRUGGLE
Many months had elapsed since Walter Butler’s capture, and no tidings of him had reached his young Indian wife, left mourning in her home on the borders of Seneca Lake.
Catharine Montour believed that he had deserted her child, for she knew him to be a man capable of any deed, however despicable, and though her heart was wrung with anguish by the sight of Tahmeroo’s suffering, she could not regret his absence, feeling that the misery of desertion was nothing compared to that which the poor girl might have been forced to endure from his indifference and cruelty.
Queen Esther had exhibited no astonishment at Butler’s absence, but in truth her lion-like heart was stirred by many conflicting emotions, all overpowered by a strong desire to avenge the slight which he had dared to put upon her grandchild. So, amid them all, Tahmeroo found little comfort, and wore away the time as best she might, concealing her sorrow with all the fortitude of her savage nature, though her altered face and wasted form betrayed the grief preying within.