It was four in the afternoon of the eighth of
February. The scouts found an Indian hut, and in it were four Iroquois
squaws, whom they captured. There was a fire in the wigwam; and the
shivering Canadians crowded about it, stamping their chilled feet and
warming their benumbed hands over the blaze. The Christian chief of
the Saut St. Louis, known as Le Grand Agnie, or the Great Mohawk, by
the French, and by the Dutch called Kryn, harangued his followers, and
exhorted them to wash out their wrongs in blood. Then they all
advanced again, and about dark reached the river Mohawk, a little
above the village. A Canadian named Gignieres, who had gone with nine
Indians to reconnoitre, now returned to say that he had been within
sight of Schenectady, and had seen nobody. Their purpose had been to
postpone the attack till two o'clock in the morning; but the situation
was intolerable, and the limit of human endurance was reached. They
could not make fires, and they must move on or perish. Guided by the
frightened squaws, they crossed the Mohawk on the ice, toiling through
the drifts amid the whirling snow that swept down the valley of the
darkened stream, till about eleven o'clock they descried through the
storm the snow-beplastered palisades of the devoted village.
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