She had cajoled him into reading through Othello with her, and they took on parts as necessary to play off the lead characters, their heads leaning together over a candle. Peyton read tentatively and Cassie prompted him by touching a finger to his forearm, whispering the pronunciation of each word that brought him up short. She seemed to have the play memorized and sometimes recited lines with her eyes closed. He never imagined people could speak so nakedly from the heart. When Cassie said, That I did love the Moor to live with him, my downright violence and storm of fortunes may trumpet to the world, he could not find his place on the page. And that same lost feeling came to him in the Indian shelter now as he fingered the pages in the near dark.
The sleet and snow continued into the next morning. Buchan had his men divide the blankets and shirts and tin pots they had carried up from the sledge camp among the mamateeks and they set out across the ice in the direction the Indian had pointed the day before. He ran ahead of the group in a zigzag pattern as if tracing a path that no one else could see and sometimes looked behind to the white men to motion to the distant shoreline. Before they had travelled a mile onto the ice the Indian edged to his right a ways and stopped still for several moments. Without looking back then he fled across the lake. “Jesus, Jesus,” William Cull said, and the party picked up its pace in the face of the gale until they reached the spot where the Indian had paused.
The bodies were about a hundred yards apart, stripped naked and lain on their bellies. The heads of both marines had been cut from the torsos and carried off. The flesh at their necks was flayed ragged as if a blunt blade had been used to behead them and loose scarves of blood draped the snow above the mutilation. Their backs were pierced by arrows. The group stood over the scene in a stunned silence until one of the Blue Jackets in the party turned away from the bodies and vomited. The sound of his retching unleashed a string of curses and several of the men, including Peyton, dropped to their knees and threw up into the snow as well.
They covered the bodies with spruce branches and secured the branches with stones dug from underneath the snow on the nearest point of land which they named Bloody Point. Buchan read from his prayer book and those that knew the words joined him in repeating the Twenty-third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer. Then the men turned away and began walking towards the headwaters of the river.
Richmond and Taylor had threatened biblical revenge over the mutilated corpses of their companions and in some measure had recruited the remaining marines and Matthew Hughster to their cause, but Buchan had insisted on an immediate retreat. Only three men had their rifles with them and there was likely to be larger numbers of Indians on the lake than they had seen in the single camp. It was possible that a party of them had already been dispatched to ambush the eight men left behind with the sledges and this thought alone made Buchan anxious to get back to them. At the headwaters of the river the men stopped to eat bread and refresh themselves with rum. A column was organized and those with rifles stood at the front and rear while those with only pistols or cutlasses travelled between. They walked single file back to the camp where the rest of the party waited for them.
The rapid thaw that followed the sleet storm made the trip down the river more treacherous than it had been coming up. The ice had come away from the banks below the sledge camp and the men packed their knapsacks with as much provision as they could carry and left the sleighs behind. They constantly fell through the jagged ice and soaked themselves and scraped their shins raw. Occasionally pans broke loose and carried men into open water and they had to be rescued with extended walking sticks or ropes thrown from the shore. In the stretches where the ice was still solid, the rush of water from the river above and a steady rain had covered it in several inches of water that numbed the men’s feet and galled away the skin still clinging to their ankles and heels. They reached the camp they’d struck on the twenty-first well past dark, completing a journey of thirty-two miles in a single day.