The Pequots were principally collected a few miles east of Pequot River, now the Thames, in two forts, or villages, fortified with trees and brushwood. After a fatiguing march of two days, Mason reached one of these strongholds, situated on a high hill, at no great distance from the sea-shore. He encamped a few hours to rest his men, but marched again before daybreak, and at early dawn approached the fort. The Pequots had seen the vessels pass along the sea-shore toward the bay of Narragansett, and, supposing the hostile forces afraid to attack them, they had spent the night in feasting and dancing, and Mason could hear their shoutings in his camp. Toward morning they sunk into a deep sleep, from which they were roused by the barking of their dogs, as the colonists, in two parties, approached the fort, one led by Mason, the other by Underhill, both of whom have left us narratives of the battle. The assailants poured in a fire of musketry, and, after a moment’s hesitation, forced their way into the fort. Within were thickly clustered wigwams containing the families of the Indians, and what remained of their winter stores. The astonished Pequots seized their weapons and fought with desperation; but what could their clubs and arrows avail against the muskets and plate-armor of the colonists? Yet there was danger in the great superiority of their numbers, and Mason, crying out “we must burn them,” thrust a firebrand among the mats with which the wigwams were covered. Almost in a moment the fort was in a blaze. The colonists, “bereaved of pity and without compassion,” so Underhill himself declares, kept up the fight within the fort, while their Indian allies, forming a circle around, struck down every Pequot who attempted to escape. No quarter was given, no mercy was shown; some hundreds, not warriors only, but old men, women, and children, perished by the weapons of the colonists, or in the flames of the burning fort. “Great and doleful,” says Underhill, “was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick you could hardly pass along.” The fact that only seven prisoners were taken, while Mason boasts that only seven others escaped, evinces the unrelenting character of this massacre, which was accomplished with but trifling loss, only two of the colonists being killed, and sixteen or twenty wounded. Yet the victors were not without embarrassments. The morning was hot, there was no water to be had, and the men, exhausted by their long march the two days before, the weight of their armor, want of sleep, and the sharpness of the late action, must now encounter a new body of Pequots from the other village, who had taken the alarm, and were fast approaching. Mason, with a select party, kept this new enemy at bay, and thus gave time to the main body to push on for Pequot River, into which some vessels had just been seen to enter. When the