“Well, well,” cried Standish, “if you have no occasion for vigilance, so much the better.” He then went ashore. Pitiful was the situation of the pioneers; four words paint the picture; filth, hunger, disease, nakedness. “After they began to come into want,” remarks the old Pilgrim chronicler, “many sold their clothes and bed-coverings; others—so base were they—became servants to the Indians, and would cut wood and fetch water for them, for a cup of corn; some fell to stealing, and when they found the hiding-places where the natives stored their corn, they despoiled them, and this night and day, while the savages complained grievously. Now they were come to such misery that some starved and some died of cold. One, in gathering shell-fish, was so weak from hunger that he stuck fast in the mud, and not being able to pull clear, he was drowned by the incoming tide. Most had left their cabins and were scattered up and down through the woods and by the water-side, here six and there ten, grubbing for nuts and clams. By this carriage they were contemned and scorned by the Indians as ‘pale-face squaws,’ and they insulted over them right insolently; insomuch that many times, as they lay thus scattered abroad, and had set a pot over a fire and filled it with ground-nuts or shell-fish, when it was ready the natives would come and, pushing them aside, eat it up; and at night the Indians, to revenge their thefts, stole their blankets and left them to lie all night in the cold. Yea, in the end, they were fain to hang one of their own men, whom they could not reclaim from stealing, at the dictation of the savages.”[419] Standish at once assembled the leading colonists, and opened to them his budget of news. The proposed massacre, the actors, all was laid bare. As frightened now as they were blinded before, all besought him to save them, and placed themselves in his hands. All stragglers were called in and supplied from his stores, a pint of corn a day for each man. This done, Standish began to dissemble; he wished to lure the chiefs of the conspiracy into his clutches, and so fight guile with guile.[420] Though suspecting that their plot had been discovered, the Indians so greatly despised the colonists that they came daily into Wessagusset, uttering gibes and menaces loud and deep. They even ventured to taunt Standish. One of the braves, Pecksuot, a bold fellow, but a braggadocio, “went to Habbamak, who was with Standish as his interpreter, and told him that he had been informed that the captain had come to ‘kill him and his friends.’ ‘Tell him,’ he said, ‘we know it, but we neither fear him nor will we shun him; let him attack us when he pleases, he will not surprise us.’”[421]