to vomit forth upon the prairie that blood-stained crew of
dancing demons and shock the night with crime.

A dead white man,--the poor lad whose early torture we had
witnessed,--his half-burnt body still hanging suspended at the stake,
was in the midst of them, a red glare of embers beneath him, the
curling smoke creeping upward into the black sky from about his head
like devil's incense. In front of this hideous spectacle, regardless
of the mutilated body, sat the ferocious old demon I had seen the
evening previous, his head crowned with a bison's horns, his naked
breast daubed with red and yellow figures to resemble crawling snakes,
his face the hideous representation of a grinning skull. Above all
other sounds rang out his yells, inciting his fellows to further
atrocities, and accompanied by the dull booming of his wooden drum.

It was into this pack of ravening beasts that poor De Croix staggered
from the surrounding shadows; and they surged about him, clamoring for
place, greeting their new-found victim with jeers and blows and hoots
of bitter hatred, viciously slashing at him with their knives, so that
the very sight of it turned me sick, and made me sink my head upon my
arms in helplessness and horror. A sudden cessation in the infernal
uproar led me to peer forth once more. They had dragged the charred
and blackened trunk of the dead soldier down from the post where it had
hung suspended, and were fastening De Croix in its place, binding his
hands behind the support, and kicking aside the still glowing embers of
the former fire to give him space to stand. It was brutally,
fiendishly done, with thongs wound about his body so tightly as to lift
the flesh in great welts, and those who labored at it striking cruel
blows at his naked, quivering form, spitting viciously into his face,
with taunting words, seeking through every form of ferocious ingenuity
to wring from their helpless victim some sign of suffering, some
shrieking plea for mercy. Once I marked a red devil stick a sharpened
sliver of wood into the Frenchman's bare shoulder, touched it with
fire, and then stand back laughing as the bound victim sought vainly to
dislodge the torturing brand.

Whatever of shrinking fear De Croix may have exhibited an hour before,
however he may have trembled from ghostly haunting and been made coward
by contact with the dead, he was a man now, a soldier worthy of his
uniform and of his manhood. Merciful God! but it