He applied to the officer in command for a detail of soldiers to go with him to search for her, but all entreaty and argument were in vain.
The agony that poor child endured as the soldiers turned away, and the war-whoop of the savage rang upon her terrified soul, is known only to God. Instead of the rescue and friends which, in her trusting heart and innocent faith, she had expected to find, fierce Indians stood before her, stringing their bows to take her life, thus to win another trophy, marking the Indian murderer.
The whizzing arrows were sent into the body of the helpless child, and with the twang of the bow-strings, the delicate form of the heroic child lay stretched upon the ground, and the bright angel spirit went home to rest in the bosom of its Father.
On the morning of the 14th, two days after Mary was seen, Mr. Kelly succeeded in obtaining a squad of soldiers at the station, and went out to search for the child, and after a short march of eight miles, they discovered the mutilated remains of the murdered girl.
Mr. Kelly’s grief and anguish knew no bounds.
Three arrows had pierced the body, and the tomahawk and scalping-knife had done their work. When discovered, her body lay with its little hands outstretched as if she had received, while running, the fatal arrows.
Surely He who numbers the sparrows and feeds the ravens was not unmindful of her in that awful hour, but allowed the heavenly kingdom, to which her trembling soul was about to take its flight, to sweeten, with a glimpse of its beatific glory, the bitterness of death, even as the martyr Stephen, seeing the bliss above, could not be conscious of the torture below.
Extracting the arrows from the wounds, and dividing her dress among the soldiers, then tenderly wrapping her in a winding sheet, Mr. Kelly had the sad satisfaction of smoothing the earth on the unconscious breast that had ceased to suffer, and when this duty was performed, they left the little grave all alone, far from the happy home of her childhood, and the brothers, with whom she had played in her innocent joy.
Of all strange and terrible fates, no one who had seen her gentle face in its loving sweetness, the joy and comfort of our hearts, would have predicted such a barbarous fate for her. But it was only the passage from death into life, from darkness into daylight, from doubt and fear into endless love and joy. Those little ones, whose spirits float upward from their downy pillows, amid the tears and prayers of broken-hearted friends, are blest to enter in at heaven’s shining gate, which lies as near little Mary’s rocky, blood-stained pillow in the desolate waste as the palace of a king, and when she had once gained the great and unspeakable bliss of heaven, it must have blotted out the remembrance of the pain that won it, and made no price too great for such delight.
In the far-off land of Indian homes,