CHAPTER XXVI
THE ATTACK AT OSWEGO
"I wonder when this will end?"
Such was the question which Henry asked himself, after he had been a prisoner of the Indians for a week and more.
The warriors had marched him to the eastern shore of the lake, and here he had been left in charge of two young warriors while the balance of the party had taken canoes and disappeared in the direction of Frontenac.
The days had passed slowly. The warriors had found something of a cave fronting the lake shore and Henry had been placed in this. His hands were bound behind him almost constantly, they being released only when he was eating or when both of his captors were at hand with their guns to watch him.
The young soldier often wondered what had become of Sam Barringford and the others who had been in the party that had landed on the shore of Lake Oneida. Had they too been captured and carried off, or had they been killed?
"Sam ought to have been able to follow their trail," he reasoned. He did not know that the trail had been followed as far as the stream where the Indians had first brought forth their hidden canoes.
In the meantime the Indians had gone to Saint Luc de la Corne and explained the situation to him. The French commander at once gathered together twelve hundred men, consisting of Canadian pioneers and Indians, and set out to do the English battle. He felt that a force would be left behind at Oswego and this he determined to annihilate as soon as General Prideaux had gone on with the main portion of the English army.
The coming of over a hundred Indians to the camp on the lake front surprised Henry and he wondered what was in the wind. But he soon found out, for several of the newcomers could talk English and they did not hesitate to speak of the contemplated attack on Colonel Haldimand's command, and of their high hopes of again laying Fort Oswego in ashes and scalping all who should remain to defend it.