352 HISTORY OF 



up ! the heart and bowels still palpitating with life, and 

 smoking on the ground ! See savages swilling their 

 blood, and imbibing a more courageous fury with the 

 human draught. They reasoned thus : These are not 

 men ; they are not beasts of prey ; they are something 

 worse ; they must be " infernal furies in human shape.^^ 

 Are we, asked they, tamely to look on and suffer them 

 to exercise these hellish barbarities upon our children and 

 wives ! our brethren and fellow citizens ! Shall these 

 savages — even those whom we suspect as accessories — 

 shall they escape ? 



Who could, with all the influences of a continued war 

 upon him, and under such circumstances, let escape one 

 Indian, and if only strongly suspected of treachery, 

 however specious his conduct, in the hght of day? 

 These, we conceive, were the feelings that incited the 

 whites to acts of cruelty ; as we would vieiv them note. 



That some of the Conestoga Indians were treach- 

 erous, appears abundantly, from the facts set forth in the 

 following affidavits: 



"Abraham Newcomer, a Mennonite ; by trade a gun- 

 smith, upon his aflirmation, declared that several times, 

 within these few years, Bill Soc and Indian John, two of 

 of the Conestogoe Indians, threatened to scalp him for 

 refusing to mend their tomahawks, and swore they 

 would as soon scalp him, as they would a dog. A few 

 days before Bill Soc was killed, he brought a tomahawk 

 to be steeled. Bill said, " if you will not, Pil have it 

 mended to your sorrow," from which expression, "I 

 apprehended danger.'^ 



" Mrs. Thompson, of the borough of Lancaster, per- 

 sonally appeared before the Chief Justice Burgess, and 

 upon his solemn oath, on the Holy Evangelists, said that 

 iu the summer of 1761, Bill Soc come to her apartment, 



