is martyr blood in her
on the mother's side, and that will help her to die unsullied. And God
nerve her to it, say I."

I said "Amen" to that; and thereupon we both fell silent, watching as
condemned men on the gallows the busy preparations for our taking off.

Again, as in the late battle, it was the trivial things that moved me
most. Chief among them the grinning row of dead Indians propped against
the fallen tree is the constant background for all the memory pictures
of that waiting interval, and I can see those stiffening corpses now,
some erect, as if defying us; some lopping this way or that, as if their
bones had gone to water at the touch of the steel.

I know not why these poor relics of mortality should have held me
fascinated as they did. Yet when I would look away, through the vista to
where the light of the great fire in the savanna camp played luridly
upon the Indian lodges, or, nearer at hand, upon the savages gathering
the wood to burn us with, this ghastly file of the dead drew me
irresistibly, and I must needs pass the fearsome figures in review
again, marking the staring eyes and unnatural postures, and the
circular blood-black patches on the heads of the three peace-men whom
Yeates and the Catawba had scalped.

While they were making ready for the burning, our executioners were
strangely silent; but when the work was done they formed in a semicircle
to front the row of corpses and set up a howling chant that would have
put a band of Mohammedan dervishes to the blush.

"'Tis the death song for the slain," said Richard; and while it lasted,
this moving tableau of naked figures, keeping time in a weird stamping
dance to the rising and falling ululation of the chant, held us
spellbound.

But we were not long suffered to be mere curious onlookers. In its
dismalest flight the death song ended in a shrill hubbub, and the
dancers turned as one man to face us.

I hope it may never be your lot, my dears, to meet and endure such a
horrid glare of human ferocity as that these wrought-up avengers of
blood bent upon us. 'Twas more unnerving than aught that had gone
before; more terrible, I thought, than aught that could come after. Yet,
as to this, you shall judge for yourselves.

The pause was brief, and when a lad ran up to cut the thongs that bound
us from the middle up, the torture-play began in deadly earnest. Whilst
the Indian youth was slashing at the deerskin, Richard gave me my cue.

"'Tis the