Will disguised very well the cause of his hesitation. He scratched his head and looked around in the wood, as if uncertain of the point of the compass. Then his face lightened, as if it all had come back to him.
"Yonder is the ridge where we three stood a half-hour ago," he said, pointing in the proper direction; "I went that way; my brother here came straight down to the camp; while Jack turned off so as to go among the trees yonder."
The answer was truthful, as the Indian well knew. He had been misled, too, by the manner of Will, who therefore gained whatever it was worth in the eyes of the Wyandots by speaking with a "single tongue."
"We catch Jack," continued his questioner; "we bring him here; he soon be here; we take him home to Wyandot town; we make 'em run gauntlet; then we kill all you."
I suppose you know what is meant by running the gauntlet. It is a common torture to which the American Indians subject their prisoners. Two rows of savages arm themselves with clubs, and compel the poor captive to run a long distance between them. As he passes within reach, each redskin belabours him without mercy, so that, as the victim has to run a long way, he is almost certain to be knocked to the earth, where more than likely he is beaten to death.
If he succeeds in running the gauntlet he is sometimes spared (as was Simon Kenton), but is often kept for other forms of torture.
What further the Wyandot might have said to the boys can only be guessed, for, as before, he was checked by another arrival that was the strangest and most important of all--one that astonished even the stolid Wyandots themselves.
CHAPTER XVI.
HOW TO CONQUER AN ENEMY.
I have told you what befell Will and George Burton when they made their attempt to find out who had kindled the camp fire in the valley below the ridge on which they halted. But the experience of Jack Gedney was the strangest of all.