“You snake-spawned white Injun! Here’s a white man being cut into chunks before your eyes. I’ll haunt yer! I’ll ghost yer! I’ll make life a hell to yer!”
The miserable wretch went on to bellow the most frantic blasphemies. One of the young Indians, stepping up behind him, thrust a red-hot faggot into his open mouth. This was greeted as an excellent joke by the onlookers, who shouted and screamed with laughter. Then one of them applied a light to the victim’s unkempt and shaggy beard. It frizzled and flared up, burning the wretched man frightfully about the face and head. The mirth of the spectators became well-nigh uncontrollable.
“How! white brudder,” said a burly buck, grinning hideously into Geoffry’s face, and patting him fraternally on the shoulder. “Injun brudder hab heap fun. Injun brudder not hurt you first. Other man hurt first—you see him—you hab heap good fun. You hurt first, you no laugh—other hurt first, you plenty laugh—Injun brudder plenty laugh. How—how!”
Then the wretched Geoffry understood that with a diabolical refinement of cruelty the savages intended that he should witness the torture and death of his companion in adversity before his own turn came. He could only raise his eyes stupidly to the grinning countenance of his addresser.
Two squaws now stepped forward—hideous hags whose long flattened breasts fell in disgusting flaps below their waists. They were nearly naked, and each held in her hand a sharp knife. Advancing to the sufferer they made an incision down each of his sides, and proceeded to skin him alive as coolly as a butcher would flay a dead sheep.
The anguished shrieks of the victim were terrible to hear; but no spark of pity did they stir in the hearts of the ruthless fiends who crowded around, gloating over this diabolical performance. They danced and laughed, leaping high in the air, hurling taunting epithets at the miserable victim, and exhorting the other prisoner to observe what was in store for him. And in their hellish glee the women, if anything, surpassed the younger and more ferocious of the warriors.
For nearly an hour the scene went on—varied at intervals by the passing of a lighted torch along those portions of the victim’s body already laid bare. The piercing shrieks of the tortured wretch sunk into laboured and hollow groans—then ceased altogether. He had fainted.
A glance having sufficed to show them that he was not dead, the performers stood back, contemplating their handiwork with a grin of ferocious satisfaction. And so deftly had they done it, that from chin to feet, the front and sides of the sufferer’s body was entirely denuded of skin, which hung from his shoulders in a bleeding and ghastly mantle. Yet this was only the first stage of his torture.
Vipan, who had perforce witnessed this hideous spectacle, felt seized with a violent and well-nigh uncontrollable nausea, and would have turned away. But as the exhibition of the slightest repulsion or feeling would have been not merely inexpedient, but highly dangerous, he was constrained to master himself. Besides, a sort of horrible fascination rooted him to the spot—an overmastering and morbid curiosity to see how the other prisoner would fare.
Sitting Bull, who with a few other chiefs had been witnessing the hellish performance with grave impassiveness, must have read his thoughts.