Opechancanough, the ferocious Indian chief, agitated with mingled emotions of grief and indignation at the loss of his favorite Nemattanow, at first muttered threats of revenge; but the retorted defiance of the English made him for a time smother his resentment and dissemble his dark designs under the guise of friendship. Accordingly, upon Sir Francis Wyat's arrival, all suspicion of Indian treachery had died away; the colonists, in delusive security, were in general destitute of arms; the plantations lay dispersed, as caprice suggested, or a rich vein of land allured, as for as the Potomac River;[161:A] their houses everywhere open to the Indians, who fed at their tables and lodged under their roofs. About the middle of March, a messenger being sent upon some occasion to Opechancanough, he entertained him kindly, and protested that he held the peace so firm that "the sky should fall before he broke it." On the twentieth of the same month, the Indians guided some of the English safely through the forest, and the more completely to lull all suspicion, they sent one Brown, who was sojourning among them for the purpose of learning their language, back home to his master. They even borrowed boats from the whites to cross the river when about holding a council on the meditated attack. The massacre took place on Friday, the twenty-second of March, 1622. On the evening before, and on that very morning, the Indians, as usual, came unarmed into the houses of the unsuspecting colonists, with fruits, fish, turkeys, and venison for sale: in some places they actually sate down to breakfast with the English. At about the hour of noon the savages, rising suddenly and everywhere at the same time, butchered the colonists with their own implements, sparing neither age, nor sex, nor condition; and thus fell in a few hours three hundred and forty-nine men, women, and children. The infuriated savages wreaked their vengeance even on the dead, dragging and mangling the lifeless bodies, smearing their hands in blood, and bearing off the torn and yet palpitating limbs as trophies of a brutal triumph.