By night we had left the Florida Mountain far behind. Along in the afternoon of the next day we marched into Deerfield, which is on the Connecticut River. Say, the people came out of their houses to see us pass, with our uniforms on and Skinny in front, swinging his rope and hatchet. "This is historic ground," Mr. Norton told us. "At the campfire to-night we'll have a story of some fights with Indians which were the real thing. They ought to make your hair stand on end. That stream over there got its name 'Bloody Brook' from one of those fights." We camped that night on the bank of Connecticut River, and it seemed a long way from home. "This river was discovered by the Dutch," said Mr. Norton, after we had eaten a big supper and were lying on the river bank in the twilight of the evening, tired and happy. "The permanent settlements, however, were made by the English. The river was explored by a Hollander six years before Gabriel's English ancestors came over in the _Mayflower_. The first English settlements, you know, were made along the Atlantic coast. Some years later a few of those settlers hiked over to the Connecticut Valley, or came up the river, and started a number of towns. One of them was Deerfield. "It is hard for us to imagine this fertile and cultivated valley in a wild state, with a few white settlers here and there surrounded by Indians. The whites considered themselves a superior race and probably showed it by their actions. Gradually the savages, who at first had been kind, grew more sullen and dangerous. This growing hatred on the part of the Indians made it very difficult for the settlers, but there was another thing which made it harder. In Europe, two great nations, England and France, were in almost constant warfare, and each was striving to get the better of the other in the settlement and possession of America. "There were some early Indian wars, with which the French did not have anything to do, but they had much to do with the later wars and attacks by Indians. One of those early struggles is known as King Philip's war, named after a wily Indian chief. It occurred just one hundred years before the Revolution, where our patrol leader lost his ancestor. Even at that early day there were one hundred and twenty-five people in Deerfield. In that war the Indians attacked the town twice." "Was that what made the brook bloody?" asked Benny.