Heated by memory and by fear, and kindled by some occasionally unfriendly acts of the colonists—for in so large a population it was impossible that all should be just and honest—many of the New England tribes grew restless and peevish. A human powder magazine yawned beneath the feet of the Pilgrims; it needed but some bold hand to drop the spark to cause an explosion which might unhinge a continent. This the Pequods essayed to do. They had long been fretful. The Connecticut colonists had befriended a rival and hated tribe, the Mohegans.[926] Sassacus, the sachem of the Pequods, and Uncas, the Mohegan sagamore, were at deadly enmity.[927] Yet Uncas was the frequent and welcome occupant of pale-face cabins from Providence in the east to the farthest onion rows which troubled the Dutchmen in the west. The Pequods panted for revenge. They began to intrigue for a war of extermination. Embassies were despatched to inveigle neighboring tribes into an alliance against the ever-encroaching pale-faces. At the camp-fires of the Wampanoags, and in the wigwams of the Narragansetts, the Pequod orators pleaded their wrongs, sneered at the whites, and depicted the ferocious pleasures of the war-path to many a credulous and eager listener. The forests became pregnant with insurrection, and at last a faint whisper of the impending peril reached the settlements. White Massachusetts shivered. Sir Harry Vane, knowing the influence of Roger Williams with the Indians, wrote him urgently to balk the Pequod embassadors among the Narragansetts.[928] At once the founder of Rhode Island set out; alone in his canoe, through a cutting, stormy wind, he pulled across the bay to the forest haunt of Canonicus and Miantonomoh.[929] “The Pequod diplomats were already at work, urging the dark dangers which hung over their united tribes, reiterating the tale of the encroachments of the whites, the chicanery, the insolence, the cruelty, which some had practised, and appealing to the Indian pride of possession and of race. For three days and nights Roger Williams, in the sachem’s lodge, mixed with the bloody-minded Pequod embassadors, and pushed his dangerous opposition to the war; and at last his old friendship and superior diplomacy prevailed. Canonicus and Miantonomoh repudiated the Pequod league and refused to dig up the tomahawk.”[930] The Pequods, no whit disheartened by this balk, determined to fight unassisted, thinking, perhaps, that the precipitation of hostilities would fire the Indian heart. Sassacus, followed by seven hundred[931] painted and yelling warriors, plunged into the woods and opened the war-path. Winding out of their beautiful nest in southeastern Connecticut, between the rivers Pawcatuck and Thames,[932] they spread consternation and the most ghastly form of death north, east, south, west.