Measured by the sense which takes cognizance of pauses it seemed no more than a moment between the stamping out of breath and its gasping recovery. But in the interval the scene had shifted from the open savanna to a thinly set grove of oaks with the stream brawling through the midst.
To the biggest of the trees I was tightly bound; and a little way apart a fire, newly kindled, smoked and blazed up fitfully. By the light of the fire a good score of the Cherokees were gathering deadfalls and dry branches to heap beside me; and from the camp below, the Indian lodges of which were in plain view beyond the intervening horse meadow, other savages were hurrying to join the wood carriers.
So far as these hasting preliminaries applied to me, their meaning was not difficult to read. I was to be burned at the stake in proper savage fashion. But Richard Jennifer—what had become of him? A sound, half sigh, half groan, told me where to look. Hard by, bound to a tree as I was, and so near that with a free hand I could have touched him, was my poor lad.
"Dick!" I cried.
He turned his head as the close-drawn thongs permitted and gave me a smile as loving-tender as a woman's.
"Aye, Jack; they have us hard and fast this time. I have been praying you'd never come alive enough to feel the fire."
"We were taken together?" So much I dared ask.
"In the same onset. 'Twas but a question of clock ticks in that back-to-back business. But they paid scot and lot," this with an inching nod toward a row of naked bodies propped sitting against a fallen tree; nine of them in all, one with its severed head between its knees, and three others showing the gaping hacks and hewings of the great broadsword.
"They've fetched them here to see us burn," he went on. "But by the gods, we have the warrant of two good blades and Ephraim Yeates's hunting-knife that the only fires they'll ever see are those of hell."
"Yeates?" I queried. "Then they have taken him and the Catawba, as well?"