But the last drop of agony was quickly distilled into his cup of life. Dragged along still deeper into the noisome valley, a cavern was reached, and even as he was about to enter it he saw the renegade seated at a little distance holding his loved one in his arms and forcing her to submit to his hateful caresses.
To mourn her as dead would have been heaven when compared to this, and the fancied torture of hell could not, he believed, be more an incarnation of suffering. The cries of the wretched girl came to his ears, mingled with the hoarse, triumphant laugh of the renegade, and he struggled like a mad-man to get free—struggled until the leathern thongs cut deeply into his flesh and the blood started from beneath them.
But it was useless. His every effort was pleasure to the savages—his curses music to their ears. Yet, regardless of what terrors were in store for him, he shouted forth his never-dying love as he was hurried into the cavern and flung rudely upon the stone floor a helpless prisoner, and yet comparatively at liberty to what he soon would be.
The heart-wrecked girl had fainted. The swift-coming death of her lover, and the horror of her own fate, was far too much. But with fiendish malice, the black-hearted white man carried her along until he stood by the side of the prisoner, and kissing the pure, pale lips—contaminating them with his touch, hurled into the shrinking ears:
"Your wife, that was to be, will now be mine! May the thought of it make your dying moments supremely happy. Ha! ha! how very happy! Think of her as being mine alone while lying here in the darkness and slowly starving—dying of thirst, with cool water trickling down within reach of your hand, and yet unable to get a single drop. Oh! how I envy you the pleasure!"
"Devil!" burst from the lips of the physician, and then, as if sorry that he had been betrayed into saying even that much, he resolutely closed them, and nothing could induce him to open them again.
It was in vain the brute taunted him both by words and actions. The blood surged from his heart as if it would burst through every vein, and it would have been mercy had it done so, and at once put an end to his unequaled suffering. But for an hour he was forced to endure. Then the Indians became impatient, and, dropping the girl heavily, the renegade assisted them in placing the fettered form of the prisoner and piling stones around and upon him, so as to prevent movement.
Then the entrance was walled up with massive rocks, and the prisoner left to darkness and the slow, accumulated, never-surpassed horrors of hunger and thirst!
CHAPTER VIII.