“They are not King George men,” he remarked laconically. “They are not your countrymen, Golden Face.”
Vipan made no reply. The remark suggested an idea. He might be able to save Geoffry by claiming him as a fellow-countryman. A strange struggle took place within him. Why should he? If he attempted to do so it would be at deadly risk to himself, and even then would he meet with success? And apart from these considerations, as he himself had told the unfortunate one, he was the last man from whom the latter should claim any assistance.
Then the bloodthirsty rage of the barbarous horde took a fresh turn. Their one victim was for the time being insensible to pain, but there was another. Him they had been reserving with this end in view. Shouts were raised that it was time to begin upon him.
With a wild-beast laugh, the two fiend-like hags approached the new victim, their reeking knives in hand, the yells and roars of the crowd urging them on. The miserable Geoffry, bound immovably to the stake, watched their approach. His eyes protruded from their sockets, a cold sweat rained down his distorted countenance, and there was a strange hoarse rattle in his throat. It was a sight to haunt the spectator for a lifetime. Then his head fell heavily forward on his chest.
Seizing him by the hair, one of the female fiends forced it back. It was as lead in her grasp. Then the truth became apparent. The miserable captive was stone-dead. He had died of sheer horror and fright.
A moment of silence, then with a wild yell of disappointed fury the ferocious crowd flung itself upon the corpse and hacked and mutilated it into a shapeless and gory mass. Then the blind madness of their bloodthirsty rage fairly let loose, they turned once more to the first victim. The scalp was torn from his head; knives and burning splinters were stuck into his flesh; and the yet warm and palpitating heart was plucked out and reared aloft on the point of a lance. Then bundles of dry brushwood were piled around both of the mangled corpses, and set alight, and soon the red tongues of flame—whose roaring and crackling was drowned by the frenzied yells of the savages as they danced and leaped around like devils let loose from the nethermost hell—shot upward, licking around the cruel stakes of torture, and a horrible and sickening odour of burning flesh hung upon the air. A great volume of smoke mounted to the heavens, and, after watching it for a while, the whole fiend-like crowd surged back to the village, there to hold a gigantic scalp-dance—bearing the reeking trophies aloft on lance-points.
All that remained of the border ruffian and the unfortunate Geoffry Vallance were two little heaps of calcined bones.