One of Mary's companions—the widow—was literally hewn to pieces in a moment, while her children were whirled round by the feet, and had their brains dashed out against the trees; her other friend, the wife of Captain Dacres, a fair-haired and pretty young Englishwoman, was torn from her side. The glittering hatchet of one Indian cleft her head to the nose, while another caught her body as it was falling, and by a single sweep of his knife shred off her scalp, and waved the silken curls as a trophy above his head. Mary was to be their next victim; but ere they could drag her down she flung herself at the feet of Ossong, and, clasping his moccassined legs, said in his own language—
"I will pray the Great Spirit that he pardon you my death; but do not torture me; do not make me suffer—I am a weak woman, and about to become a mother."
Ossong grinned hideously, and grasping her by the hair raised his scalping-knife; but at that moment his hand was grasped from behind. He turned furiously, and was confronted by Orono.
"Spare her!" said the latter, in his guttural tones.
"For what? My ears are not as the ears of an ass, therefore I hear not follies; nor of a fox, therefore I hear no lies!" responded the fierce savage; "spare her for what?"
"The wigwam of Orono."
Ossong laughed scornfully, and turned away in search of other victims, which he found but too readily.
Mary clung to her preserver. She gave a wild and haggard glance over that forest scene, in the recesses of which the shrieks of the destroyer and destroyed were already dying away—over that wilderness of red-coated dead, of mothers and their children, gashed, hewn and dismembered, scalped and mutilated—over the debris of scattered muskets, torn standards, and broken drums, rifled baggage, open knapsacks, hats, and powdered wigs—everywhere blood, death, and disorder! Then the light seemed to go out of her eyes; she became senseless, and remembered no more.
Saved by the French, Colonels Munro and Young with three hundred fugitives reached Albany; and General Webb, when all was over, sent out five hundred men from Fort Edward to glean up survivors and bury the dead. Our soldiers perished in the forest in scores under every species of torture, wounds, thirst and fatigue; many were flayed and roasted alive by the Iroquois; others were stripped nude, scalped, and made a mark for bullets or tomahawks till death relieved them of their misery.
"Thus," says Smollett, "ended (with the fall of Fort William Henry) the third campaign in America, where, with an evident superiority over the enemy, an army of twenty thousand regular troops, a great number of provincial forces, ana a prodigious naval power—not less than twenty ships of the line—we abandoned our allies, exposed our people, suffered them to be cruelly massacred in sight of our troops, and relinquished a large and valuable tract of country, to the eternal disgrace and reproach of the British name!"