There being now but four of the savages left, Gallop boarded the pinnace, whereupon one of the survivors yielded, and was bound and stowed in the cabin for safe-keeping; another yielded, but leaving Zebedee to bind him the pilot dragged away a seine huddled in the stern sheets under which he had from his own deck perceived some horror to be hidden. It was the body of a white man, still warm, the head cleft, the hands and feet nearly cut off, and the face so covered with blood as to be unrecognizable, until Gallop, dipping one of the garments stripped off but lying near, into the salt water flooding the decks, washed it and put aside the long hair; then gazing down into the staring eyes, he said as if in answer to their piteous appeal, “Ah, Brother Oldhame, is it thou! Truly I am resolved to avenge thy blood!” And, while Zebedee managed as best he could to fasten a tow-rope to the pinnace and make sail upon the bark, and John and James, pistol in hand, watched the hatches in case the Indians below should make a sortie, the pilot bound the mangled body of his friend in its clothes and in the private ensign lying at the foot of the mast, and launched it overboard. “This man is wriggling his hands free, father,” reported John Gallop, presenting his pistol at the last captive, a sachem of the Narragansetts and a very determined fellow. “Say you so, Jack!” replied his father, turning back from the bulwark over which he had just reverently dropped the shrouded form of his murdered friend. “We’ll take no chances! Lift you his feet and I his head and we’ll put him in John Oldhame’s keeping. Jim, stand you to your watch till our hands are free.” And the sachem, stolid and silent now that the worst had come, went to rejoin his comrades. Two of the pirates remained below, but as they were armed and entrenched in the hold Gallop left them there as prisoners, although the night coming on and the sea and wind growing very violent, he was after a time compelled to cast off the pinnace, which drove ashore on the Narragansett coast. Arriving in Boston, Gallop at once placed the matter in the hands of the government, who through Roger Williams and Miantonimo demanded the surrender of the murderers who had come safely ashore in the pinnace. In the end, Oldhame’s two cousins, who had been kept prisoners at Block Island, were safely returned, and some of the stolen goods; but tedious negotiations revealed the fact that nearly all the Narragansett sachems had been privy to the conspiracy, and that some of them were in alliance with the Pequots to cut off the English and resume the country only sixteen years before absolutely their own. Not unnaturally alarmed at this report, Governor Vane and his council resolved upon what they at first called reprisals, but which soon became a stern scheme of extermination involving the entire Pequot nation, and such of the Narragansetts as refused to become tributaries and subjects of the English.