In the spring there were only fifty-one of the Pilgrims--just one-half the number that had landed on Plymouth Rock. Among the first to die was Rose Standish, the Captain’s beautiful wife. Although they were not attacked that winter, they knew the Indians were lurking about, so the Pilgrims did not make mounds of the graves in their poor little burial ground on the hill for fear the savages would see how few white men were left, and attack them while they were all so ill. At one time only two men were well enough to nurse all the rest and bury them as fast as they died. In April the men were well enough to plant corn and do other work. It was so hot that Governor Carver, the oldest of all the Pilgrims, was prostrated by the heat and died. William Bradford was elected Governor in his place. When the Pilgrims had erected cabins enough to house all who were left of them, they built a stockade, or wall of upright logs, around the settlement. In April, 1621, the _Mayflower_ started back to England. Much as they had suffered through the long, dreary winter, none of the Pilgrims wished to return home on their little ship. That plucky band of men and women had come to America to stay. They marched to their church-fort on the hill every Sunday, led by their governor, minister, and captain. The men carried their muskets to be ready to defend themselves if the Indians tried to surprise them while at their worship. The Pilgrims believed in watching and fighting as well as praying. After a long time, Massasoit, the great Indian chief, came with a company of his braves to see the Pilgrims, and the white men and the red made a treaty of peace and friendship. Afterwards the chief of a more distant tribe sent an Indian runner to Plymouth with a bundle of arrows tied together with a rattlesnake skin. Captain Standish promptly filled the snake skin with powder and bullets and sent it back. This frightened the Indians, for they thought the white “medicine man” had the power to send a plague among them which would make them all sicken and die. After a time the people of Plymouth were comfortable and at peace with their Indian neighbors. Then a lad known as “that Billington boy” disobeyed the rules by going outside the limits and was lost. The settlers were alarmed, and Captain Standish took a small company of men and made a search for the lad. They found him with the unfriendly Nausets, the Indians they had fought with at “The First Encounter.”