t till it fell prostrate and dying on the plain, but
he could not have ridden it to the point of refusing to advance because
of exhaustion. He was merciful to it, and went slowly during the night;
but he did not come to a final halt until the rising sun found him close
to the camp of the dying woman.

The Indian now for the first time began partly to guess the object of
his having been brought there, and steeled his heart to bear whatever
might await him.

Dick dismounted, and grasping the Indian with a force that showed him
how helpless he would be in a personal struggle should he venture to
attempt it, led him forward, and placed him a few paces in front of his
dying mother.

She was sitting just as she had been left, but the fire had gone out,
and she trembled violently beneath the blanket which she had sought to
pull closer around her wasted form. Dick blamed himself mentally for
having put so little wood on the fire, and proceeded to rekindle it;
but, before doing so, he took a chain from his saddle-bow, with which he
fastened the Indian to a tree that stood exactly opposite the spot on
which the old woman sat, and not ten paces distant. He bound him in
such a way that he could sit on the ground and lean his back against the
tree, but he could neither stand up nor lie down.

For the first time the countenance of the savage betrayed uneasiness.
He believed, no doubt, that he was to be left to witness the dying
agonies of his mother, and the thought filled him with horror. To leave
her, as he did, to perish, had not been difficult, because he knew that
he should not see the act of perishing; but to be brought there and
compelled to witness this terrible doom acted out in all its minute and
horrible details on the mother whom he had once loved so tenderly, was
maddening to think of. All the dread tortures that had yet been
invented and practised on warriors must have seemed to him as nothing
compared with this awful device of the pale-face, on whom he now glared
with the eyes of implacable hate and ferocity.

"Will the pale-face," he said fiercely, "cast me loose, and meet me hand
to hand in a fair fight? Surely," he added, changing his tone to one of
ineffable scorn, "the pale-face is not weak, he is not a small man, that
he should fear a chief like Bighorn."

"Hark'ee! Bighorn," said Dick, striding up to him, and laying the cold
edge of his hatchet on the Indian's forehead; "if you speak another word
a