Indians fired on our pickets last week.

It will go hard with the outlying farms and settlements.

Small doubt, too, that they will strike heavily and strive to draw this army from whatever plan it meditated." "Then," said Boyd with a careless laugh, "it is for us to strike more heavily still and draw them with the very wind of our advance into a common vortex of destruction with the Iroquois." The express rode on, and Boyd, in excellent humour, continued talking to me, saying that he knew our Commander-in-Chief, and that he was an officer not to be lightly swayed or turned from the main purpose, but would hew to the line, no matter what destruction raged and flamed about him.
"No, Loskiel, they may murder and burn to right and left of us, and it may wring his heart and ours to hear the agonized appeals for aid; but if I judge our General, he will not be halted or drawn aside until the monstrous, loathesome body of this foul empire lies chopped to bits, writhing and dying in the flames of Catharines-town." "He must truly be a man of iron," said I, "if we win through." "We will win through, Loskiel," he said gaily, "-- to Catharines-town or paradise--to hell or heaven.

And what a tale to tell our children--we who survive!" An odd expression came into his handsome face, and he said in a low and dreamy voice: "I think that almost every man will live to tell that story--yet, I can never hear myself telling the tale in years to come." On paths and new-made highways we began to encounter people and cattle--now a long line of oxen laden with military stores or with canoes and flatboats, and conducted by batt-men in smock and frock, now a sweating company of military surveyors from headquarters, burdened with compass, chain, and Jacob-staff, already running their lines into the wilderness.

Here trudged the frightened family of some settler, making toward the forts; there a company of troops came gaily marching out on some detail, or perhaps, with fixed bayonets, herded sheep and cattle down some rutted road.
It seemed scarce possible that we were already within scouting range of that never-to-be-forgotten region of Wyoming, where just one year ago old John Butler with his Rangers, his hell-born Senecas, and Johnson's Greens, had done their bloody business; where, in "The Shades of Death," a hundred frightened women and little children had perished in that ghastly darkness.