Nason ran toward them, with Cap close behind. They went plunging into the close-packed mob of farmers, pulling them aside, climbing over them, until they reached the Indians and their squaws. As we clubbed and shoved our way through, following Cap and Nason, we saw Cap snatch a tin camp kettle from an angry farmer, cram it down over the farmer’s ears, and hit the kettle a discouraging blow with his fist. The farmer sank to a sitting position. Cap seized two other farmers by the necks and cracked their heads together. They fell on the one whose head was still jammed in the kettle.

“Who the hell are all you fellers?” Cap bellowed, making play with his ham-like fists. “You got ugly faces, but they ain’t familiar. I don’t remember of seeing none of you at Freeman’s Farm or Bemis’s Heights! These here’s our prisoners. Let ’em alone! If you want prisoners to play with, enlist and pick up a few! If you fellers are so damned excited over these here Injuns, why ain’t you in the army, anyhow? Or don’t you fight nobody but folks that ain’t got no guns and can’t hit back?”

He dealt the kettle-bottom another fearful whack, and rammed his blackened fist against the nearest jaw. The farmers fell back before our threatening musket-butts, and we hustled the Indians along, out of danger.

They were a stolid-looking crew, apparently without gratitude for the good turn we had done them; and I suspected, as I watched their expressionless faces, that they had taken it for granted they were to be killed: had even resigned themselves to such a fate, as they might have resigned themselves to going without food for a day. They were, I saw, returning terse and haughty answers to the questions Natanis and Lewis Vincent were putting to them.

“Who are they?” I asked Joseph Phipps. “Where are they from? Why don’t you ask them about Lanaudiere?”

“They know nothing,” Joseph said. “They Montagnais—dirty Indians from way down St. Lawrence. They get here just before battle: find all other Indians gone home. I think they go themselves, only battle start too quick. I think they very cross Indians.”

He stared indifferently at the sky; then said to me, in a weary, lackadaisical voice, “You look that squaw behind man with blue shirt hanging over leggins. What you think about that squaw?”

I looked at her. At first glance she was like any other Indian squaw of a certain age—square-bodied, heavy-featured, somewhat bow-legged and extremely pigeon-toed. Then I recognized her.

“For God’s sake! She’s the one that was in the tent at Buttonmould Bay! The one that kept watch over Ellen!”

“I think yes,” Joseph said.

He spoke sharply to the woman. She moved nearer, obedient and uninterested. I called to Nason, and when he looked around at me, he hurried back, bringing Natanis and Lewis Vincent.