CHAPTER XI.
A SCOUT OF SIX We were now penetrating that sad and devastated region laid waste so recently by Brant, Butler, and McDonald, from Cobus-Kill on the pleasant river Askalege, to Minnisink on the silvery Delaware--a vast and mournful territory which had been populous and prosperous a twelvemonth since, and was now the very abomination of desolation.
Cherry Valley lay a sunken mass of blood-wet cinders; Wyoming had gone up in a whirlwind of smoke, and the wretched Connecticut inhabitants were dead or fled; Andrustown was now no more, Springfield, Handsome Brook, Bowmans, Newtown-Martin--all these pretty English villages were vanished; the forest seedlings already sprouted in the blackened cellars, and the spotted tree-cats squalled from the girdled orchards under the July moon.
Where horses, cows, sheep, men, women, and children had lain dead all over the trampled fields, the tall English grass now waved, yellowing to fragrant hay; horses, barns, sheds--nay, even fences, wagons, ploughs, and haycocks had been laid in cinders.

There remained not one thing that could burn which had not been burned.

Only breeze-stirred ashes marked these silent places, with here and there a bit of iron from wagon or plough, rusting in the dew, or a steel button from some dead man's coat, or a bone gone chalky white--dumb witnesses that the wrath of England had passed wrapped in the lightning of Divine Right.
But Great Britain's flaming glory had swept still farther westward, for German Flatts was gone except for its church and one house, which were too near the forts for the destructives to burn.

But they had laid in ashes more than a hundred humble homes, barns, and mills, and driven off more than a thousand cattle, horses, sheep, and oxen, leaving the barnyard creatures dead or dying, and ten thousand skipples of grain afire.
So it was no wonder that the provisioning of our forces at Otsego had been slow, and that we now had five hundred wagons flying steadily between Canajoharie and the lake, to move our stores as they arrived by batteaux from below.

And there were some foolish and impatient folk in Congress, so I heard, who cried out at our delay; and one more sinister jackass, who had said that our army would never move until a few generals had been court-martialed and shot.