But the news he brought was interesting.
He had not seen Boyd.

The Battle of the Chemung had ended in a disorderly rout of Butler's army, partly because we had outflanked their works, partly because Butler's Indians could not be held to face our artillery fire, though Brant displayed great bravery in rallying them.

We had lost few men and fewer officers; grain-fields, hay-stacks, and Indian towns were afire everywhere along our line of march.
Detachments followed every water-course, to wipe out the lesser towns, gardens, orchards, and harvest fields on either flank, and gather up the last stray head of the enemy's cattle.

The whole Iroquois Empire was now kindling into flames and the track our army left behind it was a blackened desolation, as horrible to those who wrought it as to the wretched and homeless fugitives who had once inhabited it.
He added to me in a lower voice, glancing at my Indians with the ineradicable distrust of the average woodsman, that our advanced guard had discovered white captives in several of the Indian towns--in one a young mother with a child at her breast.

She, her husband, and five children had been taken at Wyoming.