Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/481

Rh however, was such a deed proved against any one of them, while there were mischievous and malignant strollers enough in those dismal days to have done many such acts, and worse ones. In the mean time several outrages and even murders were committed against the Indians by the exasperated whites, and the juries would not convict the offenders in the courts, though the magistrates faithfully instructed and urged them to do so. It would appear that, as the excitement and panic increased, something of the effect followed which had from the first been apprehended. Many of the Indians who were not the most constant or attached to their new mode of life, with others who had taken a disgust to its restraints, and still more who were discouraged or maddened by the jealousy which was turned against them, did leave the villages and enter with some measure of sympathy and active malice into the schemes of the enemy. It cannot be denied that some who had been regarded as pledged to civilization and Christianity, and who were under obligation to the whites, did prove false in various degrees of criminality. Even a young, intelligent, and well-taught Indian, called James Printer, alias Wawans, who had been Eliot's main dependence in printing his Bible at Cambridge, ran off to the enemy, though he was afterwards received as a returning penitent, he being acute enough to offer excuses or to plead for palliation. In the histories of the then frontier towns of Massachusetts which have of recent years been prepared and published by local antiquarians, we find mention of one or more Natick, Grafton, or Marlborough Indians as seen in the files or ambush parties of the devastating foe.

As day by day brought fresh alarms, with tidings all too true, that the infuriated enemy, maddened by their own unchecked advances, had burned one after another of our outlying towns, and would inevitably come within the frontiers to the older settlements, the suspicions and animosities against the Christianized Indians could no longer be