But the words had not passed his lips when the parchment flap of the window lifted. A voice screamed through the opening and in hurtled a round, nameless, blood-soaked horror, rolling over and over in a red trail, till it stopped with upturned, dead, glaring eyes and hideous, gaping mouth, at the very feet of Hamilton.
It was the scalpless head of La Robe Noire. Our Indian had paid the price of his own blood-lust and Diable's enmity.
Before the full enormity of the treachery—messengers murdered and mutilated, ransom stolen and captives kept—had dawned on me, Father Holland had broken open the door. He was rushing through the night screaming for the Mandanes to catch the miscreant Sioux. When I turned back, not daring to look at that awful object, Hamilton had fallen to the hut floor in a dead faint.
And now may I be spared recalling what occurred on that terrible night!
Women luxuriate and men traffic in the wealth of the great west, but how many give one languid thought to the years of bloody deeds by which the west was won?
Before restoring Hamilton, it was necessary to remove that which was unseemly; also to wash out certain stains on the hearth-stones; and those things would have tried the courage of more iron-nerved men than myself.
I should not have been surprised if Eric had come out of that faint, a gibbering maniac; but I toiled over him with the courage of blank hopelessness, pumping his arms up and down, forcing liquor between the clenched teeth, splashing the cold, clammy face with water, and laving his forehead. At last he opened his eyes wearily. Like a man ill at ease with life, moaning, he turned his face to the wall.
Outside, it was as if the unleashed furies of hell fought to quench their thirst in human blood. The clamor of those red demons was in my ears and I was still working over Hamilton, loosening his jacket collar, under-pillowing his chest, fanning him, and doing everything else I could think of, to ease his labored breathing, when Father Holland burst into the lodge, utterly unmanned and sobbing like a child.