t
the safer would be the trial; so at last, with set teeth and almost
superhuman effort, I crept up the beach among the silent, disfigured dead
once more.

With little trouble I found the wagon against which I had seen
Mademoiselle draw back her horse in that last desperate defence. It was
overturned, scorched with flame, its contents widely scattered; while
about it lay the bodies of men, women, and children. A single hasty
glance at most of these was sufficient; but a few were so huddled and
hidden that I was compelled to move them before I thoroughly convinced
myself that Mademoiselle was not there. I finally found her horse,
several rods away, lying against the sand-ridge; but she whose body I
sought with such fond persistency was not among those mangled forms.

Faint and sick from the awful scene, with head throbbing painfully, I
sank down upon a slope of sand where I was able to command a clear view
in either direction, and thought rapidly. I was alone with the dead. Of
all those lying silent before me, none would stir again. Not a savage
roamed the stricken field,--though doubtless they would again swarm down
upon it as soon as the sacking of the Fort had been completed. I must
plan, and plan quickly, if I would preserve my own life and be of service
to others. And life was worth preserving now, for there was a
possibility,--faint, to be sure, yet a possibility,--that Toinette still
lived. How the mere hope thrilled and animated me! how like a
trumpet-sound it called to action! She had told me once of friendships
between her and these blood-stained warriors; of weeks passed in Indian
camps on the great plains, both with her father and alone; of being
called the White Queen in the lodges of Sacs, Wyandots, and
Pottawattomies. Perchance some such friendship may have intervened to
save her, even in that fierce melee, that carnival of lust and murder.
Some chief, with sufficient power to dare the deed, may have snatched her
from out the jaws of death, actuated by motives of mercy,--or, more
likely still, have saved her from the stroke of the tomahawk for a far
more terrible fate.

This was the thought that brought me again to my feet with burning face
and tightly clinched teeth. If she lived, a helpless prisoner in those
black lodges yonder, there was work to be done,--stern, desperate work,
that would require all my courage and resourcefulness. Firm in manly
resolve, and rendered reckless now of cont