Later, with the sky all blue above, it came again—dull, distant shocks with no rolling echo trailing after.
Tahioni came to me, and I saw in his uneasy eyes what I also now divined. For to the bravest Indian the sound of cannon is a terror and an abomination. And I now had become very sure that it was cannon we heard; for Stanwix lay far across the wilderness in that direction, and the heavy, lifeless, and superheated air might carry the solemn sound from a great distance.
But I said nothing, not choosing to share my conclusions with these young warriors who, though they had taken scalps at Big Eddy, were yet scarcely tried in war.
That night we lay near an old trail which I knew ran to Otsego and passed by Colonel Croghan's new house.
And on this trail, early the following morning, we encountered two men whom my Indians, instead of taking as they should have done, instantly shot down. Which betrayed their inexperience in war; and I rated them roundly.
The two dead men were blue-eyed Indians in all the horror of their shameful paint and forest dress.
I knew one of them, for when Tahioni washed their lifeless visages and laid them on their backs, there, to my hot indignation, I beheld young Thomas Hare, brother to Lieutenant Henry Hare and to Captain James Hare, of the Indian Service.
Horror-stricken, bitterly mortified, I gazed down at the dead features of these two renegades who had betrayed their own race and colour; and my Indians, watching me, understood when I turned and spat upon the ground; and so they scalped both—which otherwise they had not dared in my presence.
We found on them every evidence that they were serving as a scout for McDonald. Probably when we encountered them they had been on their way to Sir John at Stanwix with verbal intelligence. But now it was idle to surmise what they might have been able to tell us.