Not until the dawning of another day was this fully determined. Meanwhile there came new complications—a strange and stirring adventure of their own.
Finding fair grass on the "bench" a few rods farther down the stream, Geordie had chosen a site for the bivouac, and disposed his little force for the night. While there had been as yet no overt act of hostility on the part of the Sioux, and while all the Indians taking part in the affair of the morning had now, apparently, ridden off to join the renegade band, and were presumably far to the northwest, no chances could be taken. The horses, after two hours' grazing, were led into the timber and hoppled. The sentries were posted well out. The little camp-fires had been screened under the bank, and full half the command had rolled in their blankets and settled to sleep. When the moon came peering up over the distant eastward heights, Geordie and Connell, chatting in low tones under a sheltering cotton-wood, were suddenly summoned by a trooper coming in on the run from the outpost below, a mile at least from where they had buried poor Gamble. "Indians, sir," said he, "and lots of 'em, coming up the valley on the other bank."
"Douse your fires, there!" was the first order. "Look well to your horses, sergeant. Stay here in charge. I'll send word what to do."
Then, with eager stride, Geordie hurried away after the messenger, Connell close at his heels. Two hundred yards they followed, winding along under the bank, and presently came to a sharp bend, beyond which and across the stream the prairie lay open and undulating for many a league, the only obstruction to the view being a little grove of cotton-woods on the opposite shore and possibly half a mile away, and that little grove and the level bench about it were alive with Indians and Indian ponies, the former at least in high state of excitement.
Kneeling behind the trunk of a fallen cotton-wood, two troopers were intently studying the situation. "They came riding down from over yonder to the northeast, sir," said one of them, a corporal, making room for his lieutenant. "There must have been as many as a hundred all told, with others trailing behind. There's going to be a pow-wow of some kind. They've unsaddled and turned the ponies out, and some feller's shoutin' and singin'—you can hear him now, sir."
Hear him! As he warmed up to his speech, incantation, or whatever it was, the speaker could have been heard distinctly a long mile away, and all the bivouac up-stream, not already sound asleep, sat up to listen. War-chief or medicine-man, he had a voice that dinned upon the ear of night and dominated all other sounds, from guttural grunt of assent to frantic yell of applause, as the roar of Niagara in the Cave of the Winds drowns the futile babble of the guides. Once in early boyhood Geordie had heard an Indian orator of whom his father and fellow-officers spoke ever in honor and esteem—a chief whose people wellnigh worshipped him—"Rolling-Thunder-in-the-Mountains," they called him ("Hin-Mato-Iya-Latkit," in their weird dialect). And as George and Connell knelt here now, listening to this deep, reverberant voice, thundering from bluff to bluff across the mile-wide valley, the name and fame of old Chief Joseph, whom the whites had so misunderstood and wronged, came back to the young commander with redoubled force.
But no such chief as Joseph was this who, standing in the leaping firelight, high among the red warriors about him, was lashing them to frenzy with his resounding words. No interpreter crouched with the little party at the point; none was needed to tell them that he was preaching of battle, blood, and vengeance. From time to time the wail of women could be heard, wild as the scream of the panther, and, as one sign led to another, it dawned upon Geordie and the veteran trooper by his side that some brave of the band had recently been done to death by foul means or treachery, that now the tribe was being roused to a pitch of fury, to a mad thirst for vengeance; and even before the red orator had finished his harangue the war-drum began its fevered throb, the warriors, brandishing knife, club, hatchet, or gun, sprang half stripped into the swift-moving circle, and with shrill yells and weird contortions started the shuffling, squirming, snake-like evolutions of the war-dance. Faster, wilder went the drumbeats; fiercer, madder went the dance; and, unable to resist the impulse, Graham and Connell, secure in the belief that the Indians were utterly engrossed, crept cautiously onward and outward, with the corporal at their back, determined to see what they could of this savage and appalling ceremony.
Half-way to the scene had they crept when the shrill wailing of the squaws gave way to shriller screams, to almost maniac laughter. The orator had ceased his incantations. The wild drummers stopped their pounding. The warriors, as though with one accord, clustered about the fire in fascination, and for the moment all save the squaws were stilled, and the crouching watchers, quarter of a mile away, looked blankly into each other's faces for explanation. "What on earth are they up to now?" whispered Connell.
The answer came within the minute: a sound sweeter to savage ears than love-lay of the maidens, than war-song of the braves, than even the wild, triumphant chorus of the scalp-dance; a sound that suddenly rose for a moment above the clamor of the squaws, and then was answered and overwhelmed and drowned in mad, exultant, even fiendish, yells of delight—it was the scream of a strong man in awful agony.
"My God!" cried the corporal. "They've got some poor devil there, torturing, burning him to death!"