“Yes, chief, you kin do something for me. I want to make a ‘totem.’ Bring me two pieces of bark and a pointed twig.”
One of the Indians departed and speedily returned with two pieces of white birch-bark and a pointed twig.
“That’ll do,” muttered Kendrick, faintly. “I reckon I’ll get even with the skunk now.”
Then, the renegade dipped the pointed twig in the blood that was flowing freely from the terrible wound in his head, and with great difficulty—for Dave Kendrick had little of the scholar about him—he traced some half a dozen lines on the smooth surface of the two pieces of birch-bark. On both pieces he wrote the same words, and then sunk back, exhausted.
The breath of the renegade came thick and hard. The icy fingers of Death already were closing upon and chilling their victim.
“Chief,” he muttered with a gasp, “one of these totems to the man who wounded me, Girty; the other to the white-haired chief, General Treveling, at Point Pleasant—you know him?”
The savage bowed assent.
“Tell him the totem is true—a dying man swears to it—how cursed dark it is; I—” and then, with a stifled groan, Dave Kendrick, the renegade, sunk back, dead.
Noc-a-tah, the Shawnee chieftain, carefully rolled up the two pieces of bark that bore on their smooth surface the “totems,” thrust them into his pouch, and then departed to fulfill the mission of the renegade.
We will now return to the fugitives.