"Can I not trust you, dear lad?" he said, gently.
"Yes, sir," I cried, in an overwhelming rush of pity and love. "You are first in my heart, sir—and then the King."
Sir William smiled and thought awhile. Then he continued:
"You are to know, Michael, that Lord Dunmore, Governor of Virginia, is, in my opinion, at the bottom of this. He it is who, foreseeing the future, as do all thinking men, has sent the deluded Cresap to pick a quarrel with my Cayugas, knowing that he is making future allies for England. It is vile! It is a monstrous thing! It is not loyalty, it is treason!"
He struck his pinched forehead and strode up and down.
"Can Dunmore know what he is doing? God! The horror of it!—the horror of border war! Has Dunmore ever seen how savages fight? Has he seen raw scalps ripped from babies? Has he seen naked prisoners writhing at the stake, drenched in blood, eyeless sockets raised to the skies?"
He stood still in the middle of the room. There was a sweat on his cheek-bones.
"If we must fight, let us fight like men," he muttered, "without fear or favour, without treachery! But, Michael, woe to the side that calls on these savages for aid! Woe to them! Woe! Woe! For the first scalp taken will turn this border into such a hell of blood and flame as the devil himself in his old hell never dreamed of!"
This outburst left me stunned. Save for Sir William, I knew not where now to anchor my faith. Our King already in these few days had become to my youthful mind a distant wavering shadow, no longer the rock to which loyal hearts must cling—unquestioning. And it is ever so; old faiths fall when hearts question, and I know not whether hearts be right or wrong to strive so hard for the answer which is their own undoing.
Still, however, in that distant England which I had never seen, the King, though fading to a phantom in my heart, yet loomed up still a vast and mighty shape, awful as the threatening majesty of a dim cloud on the world's edge, behind which lightning glimmers.