Nor were danger and excitement necessarily ended with the ship's arrival
in New York harbour. We were still fighting the French in Canada; men
yet told grim tales of Braddock's defeat and of the horrors of Indian
warfare. To him whom business or duty took far from the sea-board into
the country of the savage and treacherous Iroquois, there was the
ever-present probability that he would some day--perhaps many times--be
compelled to fight for his life, with the certainty that, if disabled by
wounds he fell into the enemy's hands, the scalp would be torn from his
skull ere death could put an end to his sufferings; whilst capture
meant, almost for a certainty, the being eventually put to death after
undergoing the most hideous tortures that the cruelty of the Redskins
could devise. To the colonists, "the only good Indian was a dead
Indian"; and doubtless, by the newly-landed Andrew Kerr, the order at
once to proceed up-country with a convoy in charge of military stores
must have been received with somewhat mixed feelings. On the one hand,
his boyish love of adventure would be amply satisfied, while, on the
other, there were risks to be faced which might well have caused more
than uneasiness to many an older man--risks which the boy's
acquaintances possibly were at no pains to conceal, which, indeed, a few
of them would probably take pleasure in painting in the gloomiest of
colours.
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