All the loathsome and filthy side of war seemed concentrated around the barn-yard, where sleepy, unshaven, half-dressed soldiers were burning the under-clothes of a man who had died of the black measles; while a great, brawny fellow, naked to the waist and smeared from hair to ankles with blood, butchered sheep, so that the army might eat that day. The thick stench of the burning clothing, the odor of blood, the piteous bleating of the doomed creatures sickened me; and I made my way out of the barn and down to the river, where I stripped and waded out to wash me and my clothes. A Caughnawaga soldier gave me a bit of soap; and I spent the morning there. By noon the fierce heat of the sun had dried my clothes; by two o'clock our small scout of four left the Stanwix and Johnstown road and struck out through the unbroken wilderness for German Flatts. XIX THE HOME TRAIL For eleven days we lay at German Flatts, Colonel Visscher begging us to aid in the defence of that threatened village until the women and children could be conveyed to Johnstown. But Sir John Johnson remained before Stanwix, and McCraw's riders gave the village wide berth, and on the 18th of August we set out for Varicks'. Warned by our extreme outposts, we bore to the south, forced miles out of our course to avoid the Oneida country, where a terrific little war was raging. For the Senecas, Cayugas, a few Mohawks, and McCraw's renegade Tories, furious at the neutral and pacific attitude of the Oneidas towards our people, had suddenly fallen upon them, tooth and nail, vowing that the Oneida nation should perish from the earth for their treason to the Long House. We skirted the doomed region cautiously, touching here and there the fringe of massacre and fire, often scenting smoke, sometimes hearing a distant shot. Once we encountered an Oneida runner, painted blue and white, and naked save for the loin-cloth, who told us of the civil war that was already rending the Long House; and I then understood more fully what Magdalen Brant had done for our cause, and how far-reaching had been the effects of her appearance at the False-Faces' council-fire. The Oneida appeared to be disheartened. He sullenly admitted to us that the Cayugas had scattered his people and laid their village in ashes; he cursed McCraw fiercely and promised a dreadful retaliation on any renegade captured. He also described the fate of the Oriskany prisoners and some bateaux-men taken by Walter Butler's Rangers near Wood Creek; and I could scarcely endure to listen, so horrid were the details of our soldiers' common fate, where Mohawk and Tory, stripped and painted alike, conspired to invent atrocities undreamed of for their wretched victims.