As hope faded, a deep and settled gloom stole over the sorrowing
parents, and reigned throughout the once cheerful and gladsome homes. At
the end of a week the only idea that remained was, that one of these three
casualties had befallen the lost children:--death, a lingering death
by famine; death, cruel and horrible, by wolves or bears; or yet more
terrible, with tortures by the hands of the dreaded Indians, who
occasionally held their councils and hunting parties on the hills about the
Rice Lake, which was known only by the elder Perron as the scene of many
bloody encounters between the rival tribes of the Mohawks and Chippewas:
its localities were scarcely ever visited by our settlers, lest haply
they should fall into the hands of the bloody Mohawks, whose merciless
dispositions made them in those days a by-word even to the less cruel
Chippewas and other Indian nations.
It was not in the direction of the Rice Lake that Maxwell and his
brother-in-law sought their lost children; and even if they had done so,
among the deep glens and hill passes of what is now commonly called the
Plains, they would have stood little chance of discovering the poor
wanderers.
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