If you send your levies to the Rapidan, you leave the Tidewater defenceless, and while you are hunting a Cherokee party in the north, the enemy will be hammering at your gates." "What enemy ?" he asked.
"I do not know, and that is what I go to find out." Then I told him all I had gathered about the unknown force in the hills, and the apparent strategy of a campaign which was beyond an Indian's wits.

"There is a white man at the back of it," I said, "a white man who talks in Bible words and is mad for devastation." His face had grown very solemn.

He went to a bureau, unlocked it, and took from a drawer a bit of paper, which he tossed to me.
"I had that a week past to-morrow.

My servant got it from an Indian in the woods." It was a dirty scrap, folded like a letter, and bearing the superscription, "_To the man Francis Nicholson, presently Governor in Virginia_." I opened it and read:-- "_Thou comest to me with a sword and with a spear and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied_." "There," I cried, "there is proof of my fears.

What kind of Indian sends a message like that?
Trust me, sir, there is a far more hellish mischief brewing than any man wots of." "It looks not unlike it," he said grimly.