Hon-Yost looked up and pointed to the leaves of the trees over his head. The report ran like wild-fire through the camp; it quickly reached the ear of the commander. St. Leger sent for Hon-Yost. The wily fellow adopted a different policy in talking to the English commander. He told a straight and pitiful story; how he had been captured, tried and condemned; how, on the way to his execution, finding himself carelessly guarded, he had fled, thinking he would die any way, and he would as soon be shot as hung. His escape had been narrow, as the colonel might see by looking at his clothes. And the Americans were coming in great force to raise the siege. While Hon-Yost was being interviewed at headquarters, the Oneida messenger arrived with wampum to say that the Americans were indeed coming in great force. Of course, after all this, the spirits consulted in the pow-wow gave ominous warnings. St. Leger saw that the Indians were about to decamp; he tried to reassure them; he called a council, but neither the influence of Thay-en-da-ne-gea nor that of Johnson was of any avail. "The pow-wow says we must go--the pow-wow says we must go," persisted the Indians. And the besieging army went--as fast as they could, strewing their baggage along the route. The simpleton, whose well-told lie was responsible for this sudden departure, went with them a few miles, and then contrived to slip away. He reported to General Arnold, who promptly released his brother, and gave him a full pardon. Brant was again at Oquaga in 1778, the terror of the border. Women turned pale and children trembled at his very name. In the bitter animosity of the day no story of cruelty was too black to be laid upon Brant, the great chief of these savage warriors. Brant felt keenly the hatred with which he was regarded in afterlife among frontiersmen. The proud chief wished to be regarded as a gentleman in every respect. "He always denied," as Edward Eggleston says, "that he had ever committed any act of cruelty during this cruel war, and none has been proved against him, while many stories of his mercy are well authenticated. He led, indeed, a savage force, and fought in the savage way, as the English officials who managed the Indian alliance desired. When Indians were accused of cruelty Brant would return the charge upon the whites, who sometimes, in fact, excelled the savages in their revengeful barbarity. To Brant the civilized custom of imprisoning men was the worst of cruelty; a man's liberty, he held, was worth more than his life. Of the Indian custom of torture he did not approve, but when a man must die for a crime, he thought it better to give him some chance to make atonement in a courageous and warrior-like death than to execute him after the manner of the whites by the humiliating gallows. Brant used in after-life to defend the Indian mode of warfare. He said the Indians had neither the artillery, the numbers, the forts, nor the prisons of the white men.