that was light in darkness. Then may
you, my lady-fingered sentimentalist, who go to bed of a winter night
with a warming-pan and champion the rights of the savage from your soft
place among cushions, realize what a fine hero your redman was, and
realize, too, what were the powers that the white-man crushed!

For what I do not tell I offer no excuse. It is not permitted to
relate _all_ that savage warfare meant. Once I marvelled that a just
God could order his chosen people to exterminate any race. Now I
marvel that a just God hath not exterminated many races long ago.

We reached the crest of a swelling upland as the first sun-rays came
through the frost mist in shafts of fire. A quick halt was called.
One white-garbed scout went crawling stealthily down the snow-slope
like a mountain-cat. Then the frost thinned to the rising sun and
vague outlines of tepee lodges could be descried in the clouded valley.

An arrow whistled through the air glancing into snow with a soft
whirr at our feet. It was the signal. As with one thought, the
warriors charged down the hill, leaping from side to side in a
frenzy, dancing in a madness of slaughter, shrieking their long,
shrill--"Ah--oh!--Ah--oh!"--yelping, howling, screaming their
war-cry--"Ah--oh!--Ah--oh!--Ah--oh!"--like demons incarnate. The
medicine-man had stripped himself naked and was tossing his arms with
maniacal fury, leaping up and down, yelling the war-cry, beating the
tom-tom, rattling the death-gourd. Some of the warriors went down on
hands and feet, sidling forward through the mist like the stealthy
beasts of prey that they were.

Godefroy, Jack Battle, and I were carried before the charge helpless as
leaves in a hurricane. All slid down the hillside to the bottom of a
ravine. With the long bound of a tiger-spring, Le Borgne plunged
through the frost cloud.

The lodges of the victims were about us. We had evidently come upon
the tribe when all were asleep.

Then that dark under-world of which men dream in wild delirium became
reality. Pandemonium broke its bounds.

* * * * * *

And had I once thought that Eli Kirke's fanatic faith painted too lurid
a hell? God knows if the realm of darkness be half as hideous as the
deeds of this life, 'tis blacker than prophet may portray.

Day or night, after fifty years, do I close my eyes to shut the memory
out! But the shafts are still hurtling through the gray gloom. Arr