But bright as seemed the portents, the colonists soon found themselves environed by danger—girdled by a wall of fire. The hostile Dutchman scowled in the west. The untrodden wilderness stretched away on the north. Scores of weary, pathless miles separated them from their brothers on the Atlantic coast. The vengeful Pequods were panting for war in the southeast. They had found, not peace, but a sword; their painful enterprise seemed but “a lure to draw victims within the reach of the tomahawk.” Premonitory symptoms gave warning that danger lurked in the covert beside every log-house beyond the mountains. Soon the woods were ambuscaded, “and the darkness of midnight began to glitter with the blaze of the frontier cabins.” Then shrieked the ghastly Pequod, smeared in his horrid paint. “Fathers found the blood of their sons fattening the wasted cornfields; mothers were frozen by the war-whoop which disturbed the peaceful slumber of the cradle.”
CHAPTER XXIX.
ON THE WAR-TRAIL.
“The shout
Of battle, the barbarian yell, the bray
Of dissonant instruments, the clang of arms,
The shriek of agony, the groan of death,
In one wild uproar and continued din,
Shake the still air.”
Southey’s Madoc.