te Indians rushed upon the main
door, and with repeated blows from their tomahawks and massive
war-clubs, succeeded in demolishing it, while others diverted the fire
of those within. The door once forced, the struggle was soon over.
Every man of the guard perished; and their scalpless and disfigured
forms were thrown out to swell the number of those that already deluged
the square with their blood.

Even amid all the horrors of this terrific scene, the agonised Clara
preserved her consciousness. The very imminence of the danger endued
her with strength to embrace it under all its most disheartening
aspects; and she, whose mind had been wrought up to the highest pitch
of powerful excitement by the mere preliminary threatenings, was
comparatively collected under the catastrophe itself. Death, certain
death, to all, she saw was inevitable; and while her perception at once
embraced the futility of all attempts at escape from the general doom,
she snatched from despair the power to follow its gloomy details
without being annihilated under their weight.

The confusion of the garrison had now reached its acme of horror. The
shrieks of women and the shrill cries of children, as they severally
and fruitlessly fled from the death certain to overtake them in the
end,--the cursings of the soldiers, the yellings of the Indians, the
reports of rifles, and the crashings of tomahawks;--these, with the
stamping of human feet in the death struggle maintained in the
council-room below between the chiefs and the officers, and which shook
the block-house to its very foundation, all mixed up in terrible chorus
together, might have called up a not inapt image of hell to the
bewildered and confounding brain. And yet the sun shone in yellow
lustre, and all Nature smiled, and wore an air of calm, as if the
accursed deed had had the sanction of Heaven, and the spirits of light
loved to look upon the frightful atrocities then in perpetration.

In the first distraction of her spirit, Clara had utterly lost all
recollection of her cousin; but now that she had, with unnatural
desperation, brought her mind to bear upon the fiercest points of the
grim reality, she turned her eye every where amid the scene of death in
search of the form of her beloved Madeline, whom she did not remember
to have seen cross the parade in pursuance of the purpose she had
named. While she yet gazed fearfully from the window, loud bursts of
mingled anguish and rage, that