She touched her deformed shoulder, as an angel might have pointed out its wings, and sped onward towards the scene of slaughter—her feet scarcely touched the earth. The missionary, with all his zeal, could hardly keep pace with her.
Queen Esther’s death-chant increased in volume and fury as the chain of bleeding heads lengthened and circled along her tracks. Life after life had dropped before her, and but two were left when Mary Derwent forced herself through the belt of savages and sprang upon the rock.
“Warriors, stop the massacre—in the name of the Great Spirit, I command you!”
She spoke in the Indian tongue, which had been a familiar language since her childhood; her hand was uplifted; her eyes bright with inspiration; around her limbs the white garments clung like marble folds to a statue.
Queen Esther paused and looked up with the sneer of a demon in her eyes. But the Indians who held the men yet alive withdrew their hold, and fell upon their faces to the earth.
The two men crouched on the ground, numb with horror; they did not even see the being who had come to save them.
The missionary bent over them and whispered:
“Up and flee towards Forty Fort.”
They sprang up and away. The Indians saw them, but did not move. Queen Esther heard their leap, and ended her chant in a long, low wail. Then she turned in her rage, and would have flung her tomahawk at the angel girl, but the Indians sprang upon the rock and guarded her with their uplifted weapons. Superstition, with them, was stronger than reverence for their demon queen.
The rage of that old woman was horrible. She prowled around the phalanx of savages like a tigress; menaced them with her weapons with impotent fury, and, springing on her horse, galloped through the forest by the smouldering fort and across the plain, until she came out opposite the little island where her son was buried. Her horse paused on the brink of the stream, white with foam and dripping with sweat, but she struck him with the flat of her tomahawk and he plunged in, bearing her to the island. Here she cast her steed loose, staggered up to the new-made grave, dropped a reeking tomahawk upon it, and fell down from pure physical exhaustion, bathed with blood, as a fiend is draped in flame.