A hundred picked
soldiers were added, and a large band of Canadians. All told, they
mustered six hundred and twenty-five men, under three tried leaders,
Mantet, Courtemanche, and La Noue. They left Chambly at the end of
January, and pushed southward on snow-shoes. Their way was over the
ice of Lake Champlain, for more than a century the great thoroughfare
of war-parties. They bivouacked in the forest by squads of twelve or
more; dug away the snow in a circle, covered the bared earth with a
bed of spruce boughs, made a fire in the middle, and smoked their
pipes around it. Here crouched the Christian savage, muffled in his
blanket, his unwashed face still smirched with soot and vermilion,
relics of the war-paint he had worn a week before when he danced the
war-dance in the square of the mission village; and here sat the
Canadians, hooded like Capuchin monks, but irrepressible in loquacity,
as the blaze of the camp-fire glowed on their hardy visages and fell
in fainter radiance on the rocks and pines behind them.
Sixteen days brought them to the two lower Mohawk towns. A young
Dutchman who had been captured three years before at Schenectady, and
whom the Indians of the Saut had imprudently brought with them, ran
off in the night, and carried the alarm to the English.
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