"Don't be a fool, Ben. Those Indians have killed and scalped two of your family. If you had lived on the frontier all your life as I have, you would be glad to pay them back in their own coin, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, scalp for scalp. I have had so many friends killed by them, good quiet people, who never harmed any one. Almost every year, and sometimes several times a year, I have gone with others to help drive these devils away from some fort or town. And the sights that I have seen make me hate the redskins worse than poison. And, Ben, you know enough of them yourself. How many Rangers have been tormented by them and scalped? Remember John McKeen! How he was stripped and tied to a tree; then the red devils danced around him, howled at him, taunted him, and threw their knives at him till he was full of holes from head to foot. Have you forgotten what they did then? Put a pine splinter in every wound he had, set them on fire and made a living torch of him." [Sidenote: McKINSTRY'S SCORE] "Yes, Martin, one does not forget such things, nor how they tortured others, and then made them run the gauntlet, hacked at them with knives and tomahawks till they fell, and then scalped them. They deserve to be killed like snakes, but I don't like to do it. No matter how mean or treacherous my enemy, I want a good stand-up fair fight. I am a soldier. I am under orders, and I shall do the work; but I hate it." "You needn't be squeamish, Ben. They are double our number, and if we don't kill them by a surprise, they will kill us." McKinstry had been listening, and said: "It's plain, Ben, that you have never lived where there were Injuns. Your injuries are too far off. They don't touch you. I have a score to pay that I have been wiping off for the past thirty years. Here's my tally-stick. Look at the notches." He pulled at a string that was round his neck, and showed me a little stick with seventeen notches in it. "I have killed that number of Indians. Every notch I have added made my heart feel lighter. Every chance I have to kill a St. Francis Indian, awake or asleep, makes me happy. I want to see the whole tribe wiped off the earth." The land on this side of the river was higher than the region through which we had been travelling, and we were not so much troubled by mosquitoes, which had nearly driven us crazy in the swamps. The clear, crisp air dried our clothes before nightfall, and we slept sound, breathing in the clean smell of the fir balsams. On the next day, the twenty-second, after we left Crown Point, we made a cautious advance. Rogers halted us and climbed a tree. He said that he could see the village about three miles off. Rogers went ahead with Lieutenant Turner and Ensign Avery to inspect the village, and we lay down and waited. The moon was about three-quarters full. He returned at two in the morning, and said:--