sleeping face, the lines of a form, or an arm tossed out.
What would happen on the night he found himself alone, he knew
not--death, or the loss of reason. He knew what the torture would
be,--the shrieks of women in deadly terror, the shrill cries of
children, the low, tense curses of men, the rattle of shots, the yells
of Indians, the heavy, sickening smell of blood, the still forms fallen
in strange positions of ease, the livid faces distorted to grins. He had
not been able to keep the sounds from his ears, but thus far the things
themselves had stayed behind him, moving always, crawling, writhing,
even stepping furtively close at his back, so that he could feel their
breath on his neck. When the time came that these should move around in
front of him, he thought it would have to be the end. They would go
before him, a wild, bleeding, raving procession, until they tore his
heart from his breast. One sight he feared most of all,--a bronzed arm
with a wide silver bracelet at the wrist, the hand clutching and waving
before him heavy strands of long, yellow hair with a gory patch at the
end,--living hair that writhed and undulated to catch the light, coiling
about the arm like a golden serpent.

His way lay through the Meadows, yet he hardly realised this until he
was fairly on the ground in the midst of a thousand evil signs of the
day. Here, a year after, were skulls and whitening bones, some in heaps,
some scattered through the sage-brush where the wolves had left them.
Many of the skulls were pierced with bullet-holes, shattered as by heavy
blows, or cleft as with a sharp-edged weapon. Even more terrifying than
these were certain traces caught here and there on the low scrub oaks
along the way,--children's sunbonnets; shreds of coarse lace, muslin,
and calico; a child's shoe, the tattered sleeve of a woman's dress--all
faded, dead, whipped by the wind.

He pressed through it all with set jaws, trying to keep his eyes fixed
upon the ground beyond his horse's head; but his ears were at the mercy
of the cries that rang from every thicket.

Once out of it, he rode hard, for it must not come yet--his first night
alone. By dusk he had reached the new settlement of Amalon, a little off
the main road in a valley of the Pine Mountains. Here he sought the
house where he had left the child. When he had picketed his horse he
went in and had her brought to him,--a fresh little flower-like
woman-child, with hair and eyes that tol