At noon we mustered at the tavern door, ready for our plunge into the wilderness. It meant little to Ta-wan-ne-ars and Corlaer. For them 'twas an old story. But to me it meant everything—how completely everything I did not appreciate at that early day.
The Seneca inspected me with a grave smile as I appeared, fully arrayed for the first time.
"My brother wears Mohawk moccasins," he said. "We will find Seneca moccasins for him when we reach my country."
"Do I appear as a warrior should?" I inquired anxiously.
"Even to the scalp-lock," he assured me, in reference to my long hair.
"Can you walk t'irty miles a day?" demanded Corlaer seriously.
"I have done so."
"You will do idt efery day now," he remarked grimly.
We took the road to Schenectady. It was the last white man's road I was to see, and I long remembered its broad surface and the sunlight coming down between the trees on either hand and the farms with their log houses and stockades.
But I knew I was on the frontier at last, for the stockades were over-high for the mere herding of cattle and the house-walls were loop-holed. In several of the villages there were square, log-built forts, two stories tall, with the top story projecting out beyond the lower, so that the garrison could fire down along the line of the walls.