pon the memory. A brush heap newly kindled gave out a dusky glow
flaring in waves of smoky red against the over-arching foliage. The open
space around the cabin was alive with half-naked savages running to and
fro; and in the gloom beyond the fire I saw a shadowy horseman backed by
others still more phantom-like.

There was no mystery about it. My enemy had come with sleuth-hound
Indians at his back to run me down. The savages were, no doubt, that
band of over-mountain Cherokees pledged by their chief to pilot the
powder convoy; and by their help the baronet had tracked me.

This was the first thought, caught at in passing; but when I came to
look again I saw what had been done. Sprawled on the ground before the
burning brush pile, his wrinkled face a hideous mask of suffering, with
the eyeballs starting from their sockets in the death-wrench, lay my
faithful Darius.

By what inhuman tortures they had made him point the way, or how or why
they slew him at the last, I know not, but I made sure it was his
death-scream that had halted me and set the stillness of the forest
alive with ghastly echoes.

At sight of the stiffening body of the faithful slave you may suppose my
blood ran cold and hot by turns, and that his blood cried out for
vengeance from the sod that soaked it up. With ten years more of youth
and less of age I might have tried to hew my way to Falconnet's stirrup,
and so to square accounts with him. But had I been a-mind to rush upon
the stage without my cue, another climax in the ghastly tragedy forbade
it.

This climax turned upon the capture of my horse-boy, Tomas. The other
blacks, it seemed, had made good their escape; but Tomas, lagging behind
through fear or foolishness, had given these copper-colored devils leave
to run him down and drag him back into the fire light, with yells of
savage triumph.

They flung him down upon his knees beside the captain's horse, and
though I caught but here and there a word above the frenzied yipping of
the Indians, it was plain the baronet was asking him of me.

I could not hear the black boy's gibbering answers, but that he would
not tell them what they wished to know--could not, indeed, since I had
left no word behind to track me by--was quickly evident. A cord was
found, and while I crouched behind the holly screen, aghast and helpless
as one against two-score or more, they looped him by the thumbs and
swung him up to dangle from a maple bough a musket's leng