"Look out!" cried Carbury. "There is their town right ahead!"
It lay straight ahead of us, a fine town of over a hundred houses built on both sides of the pretty river. The casements of some of these houses were glazed and the roofs shingled; smoke drifted lazily from the chimneys; and all around were great open fields of grain, maize, and hay, orchards and gardens, in which were ripening peas, beans, squashes, pumpkins, watermelons, muskmelons.
"Good God!" said I. "This is a fine place, Carbury!"
"It's like a dozen others we have laid in ashes," said he, "and like scores more that we shall treat in a like manner. Look sharp! Here some our light troops."
The light infantry of Hand arrived on a smart run—a torrent of red-faced, sweating, excited fellows, pouring headlong into the town, cheering as they ran.
General Hand, catching sight of me, signalled with his sword and shouted to know what had become of the enemy.
"They're gone off!" I shouted back. "My Indians are on their heels and we'll soon have news of their whereabouts."
Then the soldiery began smashing in doors and windows right and left, laughing and swearing, and dragging out of the houses everything they contained.
So precipitate had been the enemy's flight that they had left everything—food still cooking, all their household and personal utensils; and I saw in the road great piles of kettles, plates, knives, deerskins, beaver-pelts, bearhides, packs of furs, and bolts of striped linen, to which heaps our soldiers were adding every minute.
Others came to fire the town; and it was sad to see these humble homes puff up in a cloud of smoke and sparks, then burst into vivid flame. In the orchards our men were plying their axes or girdling the heavily-fruited trees; field after field of grain was fired, and the flames swept like tides across them.