For what I now tell I offer no excuse. I would but record what savagery meant. Then may you who are descended from the New World pioneers know that your lineage is from men as heroic as those crusaders who rescued our Saviour's grave from the pagans; for crusaders of Old World and New carried the sword of destruction in one hand, but in the other, a cross that was light in darkness. Then may you, my lady-fingered sentimentalist, who go to bed of a winter night with a warming-pan and champion the rights of the savage from your soft place among cushions, realize what a fine hero your redman was, and realize, too, what were the powers that the white-man crushed!
For what I do not tell I offer no excuse. It is not permitted to relate all that savage warfare meant. Once I marvelled that a just God could order his chosen people to exterminate any race. Now I marvel that a just God hath not exterminated many races long ago.
We reached the crest of a swelling upland as the first sun-rays came through the frost mist in shafts of fire. A quick halt was called. One white-garbed scout went crawling stealthily down the snow-slope like a mountain-cat. Then the frost thinned to the rising sun and vague outlines of tepee lodges could be descried in the clouded valley.
An arrow whistled through the air glancing into snow with a soft whirr at our feet. It was the signal. As with one thought, the warriors charged down the hill, leaping from side to side in a frenzy, dancing in a madness of slaughter, shrieking their long, shrill—"Ah—oh!—Ah—oh!"—yelping, howling, screaming their war-cry—"Ah—oh!—Ah—oh!—Ah—oh!"—like demons incarnate. The medicine-man had stripped himself naked and was tossing his arms with maniacal fury, leaping up and down, yelling the war-cry, beating the tom-tom, rattling the death-gourd. Some of the warriors went down on hands and feet, sidling forward through the mist like the stealthy beasts of prey that they were.
Godefroy, Jack Battle, and I were carried before the charge helpless as leaves in a hurricane. All slid down the hillside to the bottom of a ravine. With the long bound of a tiger-spring, Le Borgne plunged through the frost cloud.
The lodges of the victims were about us. We had evidently come upon the tribe when all were asleep.
Then that dark under-world of which men dream in wild delirium became reality. Pandemonium broke its bounds.
And had I once thought that Eli Kirke's fanatic faith painted too lurid a hell? God knows if the realm of darkness be half as hideous as the deeds of this life, 'tis blacker than prophet may portray.
Day or night, after fifty years, do I close my eyes to shut the memory out! But the shafts are still hurtling through the gray gloom. Arrows rip against the skin shields. Running fugitives fall pierced. Men rush from their lodges in the daze of sleep and fight barehanded against musket and battle-axe and lance till the snows are red and scalps steaming from the belts of conquerors. Women fall to the feet of the victors, kneeling, crouching, dumbly pleading for mercy; and the mercy is a spear-thrust that pinions the living body to earth. Maimed, helpless and living victims are thrown aside to await slow death. Children are torn from their mothers' arms—but there—memory revolts and the pen fails!