For an hour there came through the distance only the sound of savage singing. At length the white men, sitting solemnly awake in their own encampment, saw a group of the Comanches come out from the lodge and start toward a little thicket which lay perhaps a hundred yards or so away. They dragged with them something which scarce stood erect, held back with palsied feet.
“My God, Mister Dan,” broke out the voice of a boy all too young for such a scene, but taking one more lesson in border ways, “what are they goin’ to do to him now?”
But the savage justice of the tribesmen was done in such fashion as only these fiends of the lower border could have devised. No pen should specify as to this.
For a time, for five minutes perhaps, or more, there came from the thicket shrieks of a man in torture, such sounds as left these hardened men unable to look one another in the face, though not one of them wavered in his own savage decision. Now it was too late. The word of the white men had been given.
No smoke, no sign of fire arose above the top of the little thicket. There was no sound but that of the shrieking victim. The Comanches had devised some new way of punishment.
Yellow Hand came back after a long time, a smile contorting his great mouth.
“Him run little way,” said he, wiping his hands on his leggings. “No skin on him—he can’t run far.”
And for reason of that which had gone on in yonder thicket by the little stream—by reason of what one time was found flung across the bush tops there—that bloody stream came to be called the Rawhide.
The Comanche reservation, thus purchased, later established, was close to that spot. Far to the west, above Doan’s Crossing, over the high country where soon a dozen trails were to blend—seeking Ellsworth, Newton, Wichita, Dodge, Great Bend, Ogalalla, all the Army posts and all the empty upper range—the Comanches fought no more.