"The story of Indian animosity is always the same. Campbell left
his but for the fields early one bright, balmy morning in June.
Still a lover, though ten years a husband, his last look was
towards his wife, answering her parting smile; his last action a
kiss for each of his children. When he returned to dinner, they
were dead--all dead--and their disfigured bodies too cruelly
showed that an Indian's hand had done the work.
"In such a mind, grief, like all other emotions, was
tempestuous. Home had been to him the only verdant spot in the
desert of life. In his wife and children he had centered all
affection, and now they were torn from him. The remembrance of
their love clung to him like the death grapple of a drowning
man, sinking him down into darkness and death. This was followed
by a calm a thousand times more terrible, the creeping agony of
despair, that brings with it no power of resistance.
"It was as if the dead could feel
The icy worm around him steal."
Such for many days was the state of Cornelius Campbell. Those
who knew and reverenced him feared that the spark of reason was
forever extinguished. But it rekindled, and with it came a wild,
demoniac spirit of revenge. The death groan of Chocorua would
make him smile in his dreams, and when he waked, death seemed
too pitiful a vengeance for the anguish that was eating into his
very soul.
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