CHAPTER XXIII
THE IROQUOIS PLAYS HIS LAST CARD
The Bois-Brulés and Indian marauders, who gathered to our camp, were drunk with the most intoxicating of all stimulants—human blood. This flush of victory excited the redskins' vanity to a boastful frenzy. There was wild talk of wiping the pale-face out of existence; and if a weaker man than Grant had been at the head of the forces, not a white in the settlement would have escaped massacre. In spite of the bitterness to which the slaughter at Seven Oaks gave rise, I think all fair-minded people have acknowledged that the settlers owed their lives to the warden's efforts.
That night pandemonium itself could not have presented a more hideous scene than our encampment. The lust of blood is abhorrent enough in civilized races, but in Indian tribes, whose unrestrained, hard life abnormally develops the instincts of the tiger, it is a thing that may not be portrayed. Let us not, with the depreciatory hypocrisy, characteristic of our age, befool ourselves into any belief that barbaric practices were more humane than customs which are the flower of civilized centuries. Let us be truthful. Scientific cruelty may do its worst with intricate armaments; but the blood-thirst of the Indian assumed the ghastly earnest of victors drinking the warm life-blood of dying enemies and of torturers laving hands in a stream yet hot from pulsing hearts.
Decked out in red-stained trophies with scalps dangling from their waists, the natives darted about like blood-whetted beasts; and the half-breeds were little better, except that they thirsted more for booty than life. There was loud vaunting over the triumph, the ignorant rabble imagining their warriors heroes of a great battle, instead of the murderous plunderers they were. Pierre, the rhymester, according to his wont, broke out in jubilant celebration of the half-breeds' feat:[A]
Ho-ho! List you now to a tale of truth
Which I, Pierre, the rhymester, proudly sing,
Of the Bois-Brulés, whose deeds dismay
The hearts of the soldiers serving the king!
Swift o'er the plain rode our warriors brave
To meet the gay voyageurs come from the sea.
Out came the bold band that had pillaged our land,
And we taught them the plain is the home of the free.
We were passing along to the landing-place,
Three hostile whites we bound on the trail.
The enemy came with a shout of acclaim,
We flung back their taunts with the shriek of a gale.
"They have come to attack us," our people cry.
Our cohorts spread out in a crescent horn,
Their path we bar in a steel scimitar,
And their empty threats we flout with scorn.
They halt in the face of a dauntless foe,
They spit out their venom of baffled rage!
Honor, our breath to the very death!
So we proffer them peace, or a battle-gage.