118 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 
woods was frequently appalled by the sight of the 
scorched and blackened corpses of men and women 
tightly bound to tree-trunks, where their lives had 
gone out amid diabolical torments. During the sum- 
mer and autumn of 1763 more than two thousand per- 
sons were murdered or carried into captivity, while the 
more sheltered towns and villages to the eastward 
were crowded with starving refugees who had escaped 
the firebrand and the tomahawk. 
One fiendish incident of that bad time especially 
called forth the horror and rage of the people. A man, 
passing by a little schoolhouse rudely built of logs 
and standing on a lonely road, but many miles inside 
the frontier, “was struck by the unwonted silence; 
and, pushing open the door, he looked in. In the 
centre lay the master, scalped and lifeless, with a 
Bible clasped in his hand; while around the room 
were strewn the bodies of his pupils, nine in number, 
miserably mangled, though one of them still retained 
a spark of life.” Maddened by such dreadful deeds, 
and unable to obtain from the government at Phila- 
delphia a force adequate for the protection of their 
homes, the men of the frontier organized themselves 
into armed bands, and soon began to make reprisals 
that were both silly and cruel, inasmuch as they fell 
upon the wrong persons. The principal headquarters 
of these frontier companies was at Paxton, a small 
town on the east bank of the Susquehanna; and their 
first memorable exploit was the sack of Conestoga, a 
village of friendly Indians of Iroquois lineage, who had 
some time since undergone a transformation from scalp- 
hunting savages into half-civilized vagabonds, and had 
in no way molested the English settlers. This out- 
