"'Ella—Ella!' exclaimed Halket, wringing his hands.
"'The last I saw, 'tween the leaves and the blood that poured into my eyes, was the glitter of his scalping-knife; and the last I heard was her death-cry. Shoot the varmint, captain! I searched the bush for her till I was weary. Shoot the critter dead, soldiers! Ah! he was well named Le Vipre Noir, by that son of a Delaware dog, his father.'
"The savage scarcely heard the end of this, for Halket, maddened by the contents of the hunting-pouch, and brief story of Treherne, placed a foot upon the prostrate body of the Delaware, then, slowly and deliberately, while his teeth were set, his eyes flashing fire, his brows knit by rage and grief, and, while an unuttered malediction hovered on his lips, he passed his sword-blade twice through the heart of the scout. The latter, for a moment, writhed upward on the steel, like a dying serpent, and then expired.
"Poor Abe Treherne died soon after, for his wounds were mortal.
"So our false Delaware proved, after all, to have been in the American interest, and inspired by some real or imaginary wrongs, to have been the assassin of our sentinels.*
* Several sentinels of an outpost were thus actually assassinated during the American war. A Scottish periodical of the time gives a Highland regiment—the 74th, I think—the credit of furnishing the victims.
"Fort St. John soon after fell into the hands of the Yankees under General Montgomery; we were all made prisoners of war, and my poor friend, Charley Halket, died, and (far from his kindred, who lie in the Abbey Kirk of Culross) we buried him amid the snow as we were being marched, under escort, up the lakes, towards Ticonderoga."
Such was the major's story of the advanced picquet.