The situation of Philip had now become desperate. The indefatigable Captain Church followed hard after him and tracked him through every covert and hiding place. On the 1st of August he came up with him and killed and took one hundred and thirty of his men. Philip again had a narrow escape and fled so precipitately that his wampum belt, covered with beads, and silver, the ensign of his princedom, fell into the hands of the English, who also captured his wife and only son, young Metacomet, both of whom were doomed to slavery and shipped to the West Indies. His cup of misfortune was now filled to the brim. "My heart breaks," said he in the agony of his grief, "now I am ready to die." Philip now began, like Saul of old, when earth was leaving him, to look to the powers beyond it, and applied to his magicians and sorcerers, who, on consulting their oracles, assured him that no Englishman should ever kill him, as indeed many had tried to do, and so far had failed. This was a vague consolation, yet it seems to have given him, for a while, a confidence in his destiny, and he took his last stand in the middle of a dense and almost inaccessible swamp just south of Mount Hope, his old home, where he had spent the only happy years of his eventful life. It was a fit retreat for a despairing man, being one of those waste and dismal places hid by cypress and other trees of dense foliage, that spread their gloomy shades over the treacherous shallows and pools beneath. In the few dry parts oaks and pines grew, and, between them a brushwood so thick that man or beast could hardly penetrate; on the long, rich grass of these parts wild cattle fed, unassailed by the hand of man, save when they ventured beyond the confines of the swamp. There were wolves, deer and other wild animals, and wilder men, it was said, were seen here, supposed to have been the children of some of the Indians who had either been lost or left here, and had thus grown up like denizens of this wild, dismal swamp. Here, on a little spot of upland, the battled chieftain gathered his little band around him, and, like a lion at bay, made his last stand. In this extremity, an Indian proposed to seek peace with the English; the haughty monarch instantly laid him dead at his feet, as a punishment for his temerity and as a warning to others. But this act led to his own undoing. The brother of this murdered Indian, named Alderman, indignant at such severity, deserted to the English, and offered to guide them to the swamp where Philip was secreted. Church and his men gladly accepted the offer, and immediately followed the traitor to the place and surrounded the Indians.