I needed not his assurances to believe that Molly Brant, who had come down from the upper Mohawk Castle to attend this consultation, led and spurred on all the rest into malevolent resolves. I could conceive her, tall, swart, severely beautiful still, seated at the table where in Sir William's time she had been mistress, and now was but a visitor, yet now as then every inch a queen. I could see her watching with silent intentness--first the wigged and powdered gentlemen, Sir John, Colonel Guy, the Butlers, Cross, and Claus, and then her own brother Joseph, tall like herself, and darkly handsome, but, unlike her, engrafting upon his full wolf-totem Mohawk blood the restraints of tongue and of thought learned in the schools of white youth. No one of the males, Caucasian or aboriginal, spoke out clearly what was in their minds. Each in turn befogged his suggestions by deference to what the world--which to them meant London--would think of their acts. No one, not even Joseph Brant, uttered bluntly the one idea which lay covert in their hearts--to wit: that the recalcitrant Valley should be swept as with a besom of fire and steel in the hands of the savage horde at their command. This, when it came her time, the Indian woman said for them frankly, and with scornful words on their own faint stomachs for bloodshed. I could fancy her darkling glances around the board, and their regards shrinking away from her, as she called them cowards for hesitating to use in his interest the powers with which the king had intrusted them. It was not hard, either, to imagine young Walter Butler and Philip Cross rising with enthusiasm to approve her words, or how these, speaking hot and fast upon the echo of Mistress Molly's contemptuous rebuke, should have swept away the last restraining fears of the others, and committed all to the use of the Indians. So that day, just a week since, it had been settled that Colonel Guy and the two Butlers, father and son, should go west, ostensibly to hold a council near Fort Schuyler, but really to organize the tribes against their neighbors; and promptly thereafter, with a body of retainers, they had departed. Guy had taken his wife, because, as a daughter of the great Sir William, she would be of use in the work; but Mrs. John Butler had gone to the Hall--a refuge which she later was to exchange for the lower Indian Castle. The two houses thus deserted--Guy Park and the Butlers' home on Switzer's Hill--had been in a single night almost despoiled by their owners of their contents; some of which, the least bulky, had been taken with them in their flight, the residue given into safe-keeping in the vicinity, or hidden. "My brother Adam went to look for the lead in the windows," honest Jelles Fonda concluded, "but it was all gone. So their thoughts were on bullets as well as his. He has his eye now on the church roof at home."