And now Marinus Willett was in command, with meager resources, indeed, yet his personal presence on the Tryon frontier restored something of confidence to those who still clung to the devastated region, sowing, growing, garnering, and grinding the grain that the half-starved army of the United States required to keep life within the gaunt rank and file. West Point, Albany, Saratoga called for bread; and the men of Tryon plowed and sowed and reaped, leaving their dead in every furrow—swung their scythes under the Iroquois bullets, cut their blood-wet hay in the face of ambush after ambush, stacked their scorched corn and defended it from barn, shack, and window. With torch and hatchet renegade and Iroquois decimated them; their houses kindled into flame; their women and children, scalped and throats cut, were hung over fences like dead game; twelve thousand farms lay tenantless; by thousands the widows and orphans gathered at the blockhouses, naked, bewildered, penniless. There remained in all Tryon County but eight hundred militia capable of responding to a summons—eight hundred desperate men to leave scythe and flail and grist-mill for their rifles at the dread call to arms. Two dozen or more blockhouses, holding from ten to half a hundred families each, were strung out between Stanwix Fort and Schenectady; these, except for a few forts, formed the outer line of the United States' bulwarks in the north; and this line Willett was here to hold with the scattered handful of farmers and Rangers.
Yet, with these handfuls, before our arrival he had already cleaned out Torlock; he had already charged through the flames of Currietown, and routed the renegades at Sharon—leading the charge, cocked-hat in hand, remarking to his Rangers that he could catch in his hat all the balls that the renegades could fire. Bob McKean, the scout, fell that day; nine men, bound to saplings, were found scalped; yet the handful under Willett turned on Torlock and seized a hundred head of cattle for the famishing garrison of Herkimer. Wawarsing, Cobleskill, and Little Falls were ablaze; Willett's trail lay through their smoking cinders, his hatchets hung in the renegades' rear, his bullets drove the raiders headlong from Tekakwitha Spring to the Kennyetto, and his Oneidas clung to the edges of invasion, watching, waiting, listening in the still places for the first faint sound of that advance that meant the final death-grapple. It was coming, surely coming: Sir John already harrying the Sacandaga; Haldimand reported on the eastern lakes; Ross and the Butlers expected from Niagara, and nothing now to prevent Clinton from advancing up the Hudson from New York, skirting West Point, and giving the entire north to the torch. This was what confronted Tryon County; but the army needed grain, and we were there to glean what we might between fitful storms, watching that solid, thunderous tempest darkening the north from east to west, far as the eye could see.
Colonel Willett had lighted his clay pipe, and now, map spread across his knees and mine, he leaned over, arms folded, smoking, and examining the discolored and wrinkled paper.
"Where is Adriutha, Carus?" he drawled.
I pointed out the watercourse, traced in blue, showing him the ancient site and the falls near by.
"And Carenay?"
Again I pointed.
"Oswaya?"
"Only tradition remains of that lost village," I said. "Even in the Great Rite those who pronounce the name know nothing more than that it once existed. It is so with Kayaderos and Danascara; nobody now knows exactly where they were."
"And Thendara?"