There was no mystery about it. My enemy had come with sleuth-hound Indians at his back to run me down. The savages were, no doubt, that band of over-mountain Cherokees pledged by their chief to pilot the powder convoy; and by their help the baronet had tracked me.
This was the first thought, caught at in passing; but when I came to look again I saw what had been done. Sprawled on the ground before the burning brush pile, his wrinkled face a hideous mask of suffering, with the eyeballs starting from their sockets in the death-wrench, lay my faithful Darius.
By what inhuman tortures they had made him point the way, or how or why they slew him at the last, I know not, but I made sure it was his death-scream that had halted me and set the stillness of the forest alive with ghastly echoes.
At sight of the stiffening body of the faithful slave you may suppose my blood ran cold and hot by turns, and that his blood cried out for vengeance from the sod that soaked it up. With ten years more of youth and less of age I might have tried to hew my way to Falconnet's stirrup, and so to square accounts with him. But had I been a-mind to rush upon the stage without my cue, another climax in the ghastly tragedy forbade it.
This climax turned upon the capture of my horse-boy, Tomas. The other blacks, it seemed, had made good their escape; but Tomas, lagging behind through fear or foolishness, had given these copper-colored devils leave to run him down and drag him back into the fire light, with yells of savage triumph.
They flung him down upon his knees beside the captain's horse, and though I caught but here and there a word above the frenzied yipping of the Indians, it was plain the baronet was asking him of me.
I could not hear the black boy's gibbering answers, but that he would not tell them what they wished to know—could not, indeed, since I had left no word behind to track me by—was quickly evident. A cord was found, and while I crouched behind the holly screen, aghast and helpless as one against two-score or more, they looped him by the thumbs and swung him up to dangle from a maple bough a musket's length or such a matter before the cabin door.
He bore the torture patiently, as some poor dumb beast suffering at the hand of man, and would not part his lips for all the captain's curses. But this was only the merciful beginning. With yells of savage fury the Indians carried brands to make a slow fire at his feet; and, lest that should not be enough, a brace of them climbed to the roof, tore off the splits for kindling, and set the cabin wall alight behind him.
You may thank God, my dears, that you are living in a kindlier age. Mayhap the savage, now a-march toward the setting sun, is still as pitiless as he was; but not in any corner of the world, I think, would Anglo-Saxon men, wearing the king's or any other uniform, be witnesses unmoved of such a devil's carnival of torment as this that made me nauseate with horror.
As with the stretching of the cord the wretched black spun slowly round and round before the growing blaze, his cries were something terrible to hear. And when the fire light played upon his face it was a sight to freeze the blood: the eyes shut tight against the shriveling heat, the cracking lips drawn back, the black skin changing to a dry and sickly brown. And ever and anon between the shrieks the parched lips shaped a plea: "O Massa! Massa Cap'm! shoot po' nigga and let um die!"