disappeared in the ruck below.

Never in a life of fighting have I battled as I did then, feeling that
I alone might hope to reach her side and beat back these foul fiends
till help should come to us. The stock of my rifle shattered like
glass; but I swung the iron barrel with what seemed to me the strength
of twenty men, striking, thrusting, stabbing, my teeth set, my eyes
blurring with a mist of blood, caring for nothing except to hit and
kill. I know not now whether I advanced at all in that last effort,
though my horse trod on dead bodies. Only once in those awful seconds
did I gain a glimpse of Mademoiselle through the mist of struggle, the
maze of uplifted arms and striking steel. She had reined her horse
back against a wheel of the halted wagon, and with white face and
burning eyes was lashing desperately with the loaded butt of her
riding-whip at the red hands which sought to drag her from the saddle.

The sight maddened me, and again my spurs were driven into my horse's
flanks. As he plunged forward, some one from behind struck me a
crushing blow across the back of the head, and I reeled from my saddle,
a red mist over my eyes, and went hurling face downward upon the mass
of reeling, tangled bodies.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE FIELD OF THE DEAD

The fierce plunging of my horse in his death agony, and his final
pitching forward across my prostrate body, were doubtless all that saved
my life. Yielding to their mad desire for plunder, the savages scattered
when I fell, and left me lying there for dead. I do not think I quite
lost consciousness in those first moments, although everything became
blurred to my sight, and I was imprisoned by the weight above me so that
the slightest effort to move proved painful; indeed, I breathed only with
the greatest difficulty.

But I both heard and saw, and my mind was intensely occupied with the
rush of thought, the horror of all that was going on about me. How I
wish I might blot it out,--forget forever the hellish deeds of those
dancing devils who made mock of human agony and laughed at tears and
prayers! It was plain, as the wild cries of rejoicing rose on every
side, that the Indians had swept the field. The distant sound of firing
ceased, and I could hear the pitiful cries of women, the frightened
shrieks of children, the shrill note of intense agony wrung from tortured
lips. Close beside me lay a dead warrior, his hideously painted face,
with its wide, gla