isplayed in those awful moments; standing there
motionless, with never a tremor, no twitching of a muscle, his scornful
eyes following the deadly steel, his lips jeering at the throwers, as
he coolly played the game whose stake was death. At last some savage
cast from farther back amid the mass of howling contestants; I failed
to see the upraised hand that grasped the weapon, but caught its sudden
gleam as it sped onward, and De Croix was pinned helpless, the steel
blade wedging his long hair deep into the wood.

A dozen screaming squaws now hustled forward the materials for a fire;
I saw branches, roots, and leaves, piled high about his knees, and
marked with a shudder the film of blue smoke as it soared upward ere
the flame caught the green wood. Then suddenly some one kicked the
pile over, hurling it into the faces of those who stooped beside it;
and the fierce clamor ceased as if by magic.

I staggered to my knees, wondering what it could mean,--this strange
silence after all the uproar. Then I saw. Out from the shadows, as if
she herself were one, the strange girl who had been my companion glided
forward into the red radius of the flame, and faced them, her back to
De Croix.

Never shall I fail to recall her as she then appeared,--a veritable
goddess of light fronting the fiends of darkness. With cheeks so white
as to seem touched with death, her dark eyes glowed in consciousness of
power, while her long, sweeping tresses rippled below her waist,
gleaming in a wild red beauty almost supernatural. How womanly she
was, how fair to look upon, and how unconscious of aught save her
mission! One hand she held before her in imperious gesture of command;
with the other she uplifted the crucifix, until the silver Christ
sparkled in the light. "Back!" she said clearly. "Back! You shall
not torture this man! I know him. He is a soldier of France!"

CHAPTER XXX

THE RESCUE AT THE STAKE

The word uttered by the strange woman was one to conjure with even then
in the Illinois country. Many a year had passed since the French flag
ruled those prairies, yet not a warrior there but knew how the men of
that race avenged an injury,--how swift their stroke, how keen their
steel.

I watched the startled throng press closely backward, as if awed by her
mysterious presence, influenced insensibly by her terse sentence of
command, each dusky face a reflex of its owner's perplexity. Drunken
as most of them were, c