as we
were; the Catawba holding the pack horses, and Jennifer and I the three
that bore the ghastly burdens of mortality. The bodies of the slain had
been flung across the saddles to balance as they might; and to the
pommel of that saddle which bore the trunk of the five-feathered
chieftain, Uncanoola had knotted the grisly head by its scalp-lock to
dangle and roll about with every restless movement of the horse--a
hideous death-mask that seemed to mop and mow and stare fearsomely at us
with its wide-open glassy eyes.

With this background fit for the staging of a scene in Dante Alighieri's
tragic comedy, the looming mountains, the upper air graying on to dusk,
and the solemn forest aisles full of lurking shadows, you are to picture
the old frontiersman, bareheaded and on his knees, pouring forth his
soul in all the sonorous phrase of Holy Writ, now in thanksgiving, and
now in most terrible beseechings that all the vials of Heaven's wrath
might be poured out upon our enemies.

His face, commonly a leather mask to hide the man behind it, was now
ablaze with the fire of zealotry; and, truly, in these his spasm-fits of
supplication he stood for all that is most awe-inspiring and unnerving,
asking but a little stretch of the imagination to figure him as one of
those old iron-hard prophets of denunciation come back to earth to be
the herald of the wrath of God.

'Twas close upon actual nightfall when the old man rose from his knees
and, with the rising, put off the beadsman and put on the shrewd old
Indian fighter. Followed some hurried counselings as to how we should
proceed, and in these the hunter set the pace for us as his age and vast
experience in woodcraft gave him leave.

His plan had all the merit of simplicity. Now that we had the horses,
Richard's notion of an approach from the head of the sunken valley
became at once the most hopeful of any. So Ephraim Yeates proposed that
we betake ourselves to the mountain top and to the head of that ravine
which the Catawba and I had discovered. Here we should leave the horses
well hidden and secured, make our way down the ravine, and, with the
stream for a guide, follow the sunken valley to the camp at its lower
end. Once on the ground without having given the alarm, we might hope to
free the captives under cover of the darkness; and our retreat up the
valley would be far less hazardous than any open flight by way of the
unexplored road the powder train had used.

So sa