As he looked away he caught sight of a broken trunk at the edge of the track. Carved into the bark was a single letter: “H”. It signified “Highway”, a sign that the road had been widened by army engineers. They had passed several similar markers during the time they had been travelling and at each one Johnson had sensed the ghost of his father peering over his shoulder.

The column had come to a halt. Soldiers and civilians alike had taken up temporary residence along the wayside. Canteens had been broached and pipes lit and plumes of tobacco smoke began to drift into the air.

Consigning thoughts of his father to the back of his mind, Johnson walked his horse slowly down the line. From what he could see and from the grins and respectful nods he was getting, all the men appeared to be in good spirits. With just cause, he thought to himself. Having visited the wrath of God upon a succession of rebel homesteads and Continental supply lines, not to mention escaping without suffering a single casualty, a celebratory pipe was the very least they were owed.

The calibre of Johnson’s men was not the only factor in the raid’s success; good intelligence and forward planning had played their part too. The colonel had chosen harvest time to strike because the bulk of the local militia regiments were made up of farmers who would be released from duty to attend their crops at this time of year. Long before the raiders landed at Crown Point they had been confident that their presence would go unhindered.

And so it had proved. As a result, a substantial number of Loyalists had been rescued and prisoners taken without opposition, and a not inconsiderable amount of damage had been inflicted upon an unsuspecting enemy. By his officers’ reckoning, some one hundred and twenty rebel-owned barns, mills and houses had been destroyed on the north side of the Mohawk River, put to the torch by the colonel’s soldiers and their native allies.

Inevitably, blood had been spilled along the way; mostly from livestock, slaughtered during the coordinated attacks, though there had been human fatalities as well. Not that any sleep had been lost over either the cattle or the rebel corpses that had been left on the ground. Every one of them was another nail in Congress’s coffin.

As far as could be calculated, the rebels had suffered between fifteen and twenty dead. Not many, considering the acreage and the number of properties that had been laid to waste. Nevertheless, a sufficient quotient to have sent a resounding message to all concerned.