This brilliant success, as it was then termed, encouraged Lovewell to his last and fatal undertaking. Early in March, he again took the field, intending to attack the Indian villages of Piguacket, on the upper part of the Saco, where a formidable tribe had anciently a settled habitation, though at this period they only paid occasional visits there. His company consisted of forty-six men, including a chaplain and a surgeon. Two of them became lame, and returned. Another falling sick, they halted, and built a stockade fort on the west side of Great Ossipee Lake, partly for the accommodation of the sick man, and partly for a stronghold in case of any reverse. Here the surgeon was left with the invalid man, and eight of the company for a guard. Lovewell, with his thirty-four men, advanced to the northward about twenty-two miles, and encamped on the shore of a pond in the evening of the 7th of May. Early the next morning, while the men were at prayer, they heard the report of a gun, and discovered an Indian about a mile distant, standing on a point of land jutting out into the water. They had been alarmed during the night by noises round their camp, which they imagined were made by Indians, and now suspected that the one whom they saw was placed there to decoy them, and that a body of the enemy was in their front. A council of war was held, and they decided to go forward, and, by marching round the pond, to gain the spot where the Indian stood. That they might be ready for action, they disencumbered themselves of their packs, and left them, without any guard, in a pine plain, where the trees were too thinly set to hide them.