Massachusetts, beat and captured his best German troops at Bennington; the country was emptied of its people and of its cattle, was stripped of its forage even, as he advanced; and every step he took threatened to cut him off alike from his sources of supply and from his lines of retreat. It maddened the watchful men of those scattered homes to see him come with half a thousand savages at his front. It had been bad enough to see any invaders on that defenceless border: but the presence of the redskins put their homes and their lives in immediate and deadly peril, and they mustered as they would have mustered to meet a threat of massacre. Burgoyne himself would have checked his savage allies when the mischief had been done and it was too late; but he only provoked them to desert him and leave him without guides in an almost pathless wilderness, without appeasing the men their presence had brought swarming upon his flanks. [Illustration: ARTHUR ST. CLAIR] [Illustration: SAMUEL ADAMS] [Illustration: BENJAMIN LINCOLN] He pushed forward nevertheless, dogged, indomitable, determined to risk everything rather than fail of his rendezvous with Howe and St. Leger at the Hudson. And yet close upon the heels of his defeat and heavy loss at Bennington came news that St. Leger had already failed. Late in July, St. Leger had thrust his way cautiously through the forests from Oswego to the upper waters of the Mohawk; and there, on the 3d of August, he had set himself down to take Fort Stanwix, with its little garrison of six hundred men under Colonel Peter Gansevoort. There, if anywhere, in those northern forests by the Mohawk, might men who fought in the name of the King look to be bidden Godspeed and given efficient aid and counsel by the settlers of the country-side through which they moved. There William Johnson (Sir William since the French war) had reigned supreme for a long generation, his energy, subtlety, quick resource, and never failing power over men holding the restless Iroquois always to their loyalty to the English, the English always to their duty to the crown. Sir William had been dead these three years; but his son, Sir John, still held his ancient allies to their fealty and stood at the front of those who would not accept the revolution wrought at Boston and Williamsburg and Philadelphia. This war among the English sadly puzzled the red warriors of the forest. War between the king of the French and the king of the English they understood; it was a war of hostile peoples; but this war of the English against their chiefs? “You are two brothers,” they said, “of one blood.” The Mohawks deemed it some subtile treachery, as their great chief did, the redoubtable Joseph Brant, himself trained with the English boys in Mr. Wheelock’s school at Lebanon and taught to see the white man close at hand; and the Cayugas and Senecas followed them in their allegiance to the mighty sachem who “lived over the great lake,”