It is believed that six hundred others were never given up. The captives were not always glad to go back to their old homes, and the Indians had sometimes to use force in bringing them to the camp where their friends and kindred who had come with Bouquet’s army were waiting to receive them. Many had been taken from their homes when they were so young that they could not remember them, and they had learned to love the Indians, who had brought them up like their own children, and treated them as lovingly as the fathers and mothers from whom they had been stolen. In the charm of the savage life these children of white parents had really become savages; and certain of the young girls had grown up and married Indian husbands to whom they were tenderly attached. The scenes of parting between all these were very touching on both sides, and it is told of one Indian who had married a Virginian girl that he followed her back to the frontier at the risk of his life from her people. The Indians gave up the captives often so dear to them, with tears and lamentations, while on the other hand their kindred waited to receive them in an anguish of hope and fear. As the captives came into the camp, parents sought among them for the little ones they had lost, and husbands for the wives who had been snatched from their desolated homes. Brothers and sisters met after a parting so long that one or other had forgotten the language they once spoke in common. The Indians still hung about the camp, and came every day to visit their former prisoners and bring them gifts. When the army took up its march some of them asked leave to follow it back to Fort Pitt, and on the way they supplied their adopted children and brothers with game, and sought in every way to show their love for them. Bouquet reached Pittsburg in ten days, without the loss of a single life at the hands of the savages, and with all his men in excellent health. Each day of his march he had pitched his camp among scenes of sylvan loveliness, on the banks of the pleasant streams that watered the fertile levels and the wild meadows, or wound through the rich valleys between the low hills. It would have been wonderful if his Pennsylvanian and Virginian recruits had not looked upon the land with covetous eyes: even the fathers and husbands and brothers who had come seeking their kindred among the Indians, had seen it with a longing to plant their homes in it. Its charms had been revealed to great numbers of the people who had known of it only from the traders before, and the savage was doomed from that time to lose it; for it already belonged to the king of England, and it rested with the English colonists to come and take it; or so, at least, they thought. IV. THE FORTY YEARS’ WAR FOR THE WEST.