Shutters were drawn and bolted over every window, but candle-light streamed through loopholes in the tap-room, and I could hear men singing within and tapping on bowls with spoons:
"My true love is old Brown Bess."
Nosing the house delicately, I perceived odours of cooking, of rum toddy, and of tobacco smoke. Clearly Butler's company were supping after their long jog on the back trail from Fortress Pitt.
Satisfied that all was safe, I had silently begun skirting the road ditch shadowed by the fence, when a dark heap, which I had taken for a stump in the road, moved, rolled over, and moaned.
I stopped, frozen motionless. After a moment's wary reconnoitring, I crept forward again along the ditch, eyes fastened on the dim shape ahead, a human form lying in the black shadows of the road.
When I came closer I understood. At my feet, in a drunken stupor, sprawled a young Cayuga girl, limbs plastered with mud, body saturated and reeking with the stench of spirits. Her black hair floated in a pool of rain which spread out reflecting stars. One helpless hand clutched the mud.
I lifted the little thing and bore her to the shadow of the fence; but here, to my amazement, lay a drunken squaw, doubtless her mother, still clinging to an empty bottle; and, along the ditch and fence, flung in beastly, breathing heaps, I counted seven more barbarians, old and young, from the infant of ten to the young buck of twenty, all apparently of the same family, and all in a sodden swoon.
This was the work, then, done by a single agent of my Lord Dunmore, Royal Governor of Virginia!
Like torpid snakes they lay there, glistening in the grass, the children naked, the mother in rags, breathing out poison under the stars. The very air of morn sweated rum; candle-light from the loopholes fell across the bodies, flung limply on the grass.
There was nothing I could do for these victims of Greathouse; no aid within my power to give them. Heartsick, I turned away, and, quickening my steps, passed swiftly down the muddy trail, hastening to mend my pace ere dawn should find me missing at the council-fires burning for me on the dark Ohio.