Chapter III

When the savage had departed,
Careless of the woe he caused,
Then, amid the smouldering ruins,
An Oneida came and paused.

He was tall and gaunt and aged,
Crowned his head with films of snow;
For the frosts of seventy winters
Thus had honored Skenando.

Gazed he on the work of evil,
Which around its traces spread,
On the blood which stained the herbage,
On the pale and mangled dead.

“I have been,” so spake the chieftain,
“Forty years the white man’s friend;
So have been to Walter Butler—
Would have proved so to the end.

“Cruel son of lying father,
Faithless, too, as this may show,
You shall rue the dreadful doing
Which creates in me a foe.

“Here are friends—I knew and loved them,
Proved them often in my need.
Great Monedo’s curse be on you,
Walter Butler, for this deed.

“Here, by all his bitter sorrow,
By his scant and whitened hairs,
By the spirits of the fallen,
Thus the old Oneida swears:

“He will follow in your pathway,
He will hang upon your track,
Through the hurry of the foray,
Through the battle’s awful rack,

“Till at length his keen-edged hatchet,
Driven to your coward brain,
With its crashing voice shall utter,
‘Walter Butler has been slain!’”