There was no warning; no time for concert,
perhaps none for flight. Sudden as the leaping panther, a pack of human
wolves burst out of the forest, did their work, and vanished.
If the country had been an open one, like the plains beyond the
Mississippi, the situation would have been less frightful; but the
forest was everywhere, rolled over hill and valley in billows of
interminable green,--a leafy maze, a mystery of shade, a universal
hiding-place, where murder might lurk unseen at its victim's side, and
Nature seemed formed to nurse the mind with wild and dark imaginings.
The detail of blood is set down in the untutored words of those who saw
and felt it. But there was a suffering that had no record,--the mortal
fear of women and children in the solitude of their wilderness homes,
haunted, waking and sleeping, with nightmares of horror that were but
the forecast of an imminent reality. The country had in past years been
so peaceful, and the Indians so friendly, that many of the settlers,
especially on the Pennsylvanian border, had no arms, and were doubly in
need of help from the Government. In Virginia they had it, such as it
was. In Pennsylvania they had for months none whatever; and the Assembly
turned a deaf ear to their cries.
Far to the east, sheltered from danger, lay staid and prosperous
Philadelphia, the home of order and thrift. It took its stamp from the
Quakers, its original and dominant population, set apart from the other
colonists not only in character and creed, but in the outward symbols of
a peculiar dress and a daily sacrifice of grammar on the altar of
religion.
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