intrigues and conspiracies. Intelligence from Canada, with its burden of
promises to speedily glut the passions of war, circulated stealthily all
about us. How it came, how it was passed from hearth to hearth, defied our
penetration. We could only feel that it was in the air around us, and
strive to locate it--mainly in vain--and shudder at its sinister omens.

For all felt a blow to be impending, and only marvelled at its being so
long withheld. It was two years now since Colonel Guy Johnson, with the
Butlers and Philip Cross, had gone westward to raise the Indians. It was
more than a year since Sir John and his retainers had joined them. Some of
these had been to England in the interim, and we vaguely heard of others
flitting, now in Quebec, now at Niagara or Detroit; yet none doubted that
the dearest purpose of all of them was to return with troops and savages
to reconquer the Valley. This was the sword which hung daily, nightly,
over our heads.

And as the waiting time lengthened out it grew terrible to weak and
selfish minds. More and more men sought to learn how they might soften and
turn its wrath aside, not how they might meet and repel its stroke.

Congress would not believe in our danger--perhaps could not have helped us
if it would. And then our own friends at this lost heart. The flights to
Canada multiplied; our volunteer militiamen fell away from the drills and
patrols. Stories and rumors grew thicker of British preparations, of
Indian approaches, of invasion's red track being cleared up to the very
gates of the Valley. And no man saw how the ruin was to be averted.

It was in the second week of July, at almost the darkest hour in that
gloomy first part of 1777, that a singular link in the chain of my story
was forged.