The Hidden Children by Robert William Chambers Chapter 20 Page 15

every water-course, to wipe out the lesser towns, gardens, orchards, and harvest fields on either flank, and gather up the last stray head of the enemy’s cattle. The whole Iroquois Empire was now kindling into flames and the track our army left behind it was a blackened desolation, as horrible to those who wrought it as to the wretched and homeless fugitives who had once inhabited it.

He added to me in a lower voice, glancing at my Indians with the ineradicable distrust of the average woodsman, that our advanced guard had discovered white captives in several of the Indian towns — in one a young mother with a child at her breast. She, her husband, and five children had been taken at Wyoming. The Indians and Tories had murdered all save her and her baby. Her name was Mrs. Lester.