“How was it, Father?” pleaded the boy, fairly wriggling with excitement.
“As I remember,” the old merchant continued, musingly, “a week or so before, the ‘Pioneers’ had got hold of one of our gang and had given him the ‘third degree.’ They said that if he was an ‘Indian’ he ought to look like one. To make sure of it, they gave him a coat of war-paint with some stuff they got from a drug store, and the war-paint wouldn’t wash off. It wouldn’t even scrape off. It was nearly a month before it wore off.
“Our turn came when this ‘Pioneer’ was delivered into our hands. We told him we were going to have our revenge, and I tell you, he was scared stiff! We brought the youngster to our own private ‘Indian’ cave, and there we discussed tortures, so that he could hear what was being said. Each one of us had some kind of torment more excruciating than the last.”
“It sure must have been blood-curdling to the chap who was listening,” put in Perry, with an appreciative grin.
“I haven’t a doubt of it,” his father agreed. “Finally, we came to a formal decision and informed the victim that he was to be scalped alive. You should have heard him yell! However, yelling didn’t do any good, for the cave was half a mile from town and a couple of hundred feet underground, and he would have had to hoot like a Mississippi River steamboat in order to be heard at all. So we went ahead and scalped him.”
“How, Father?” queried the boy, eagerly.
“We made quite a ceremony of it,” was the reply. “First of all, we gathered a lot of stinging nettles that grew outside the cave and mashed them up with vinegar in an old tin can. The vinegar, you know, holds the sting; it even seems to make it stronger. Then, in an old iron pot we had, we mixed up a lot of corn syrup and red ink—we always used that in our initiation powwow, and it certainly did look and feel like blood.
“Next we blindfolded the unfortunate ‘Pioneer.’ We dipped a piece of string in the nettle juice and tied it loosely round his head, and sprinkled his head with the nettle vinegar, knowing that it would only take a minute or two before it began to sting. Then we took his cap, dipped it into the red ink and syrup, and clapped it—not boiling, but still fairly hot—on his head. At the same instant, one of the ‘braves’ stuck a bit of stick in a loop of the nettle-soaked string and twisted it tight, also running his thumbnail around, as if it were a knife. The cap and the blindfold were then yanked off together.
“The youngster gave just one look. He saw the cap, all blood, in the other fellow’s hand, and jumped to the conclusion that it was his scalp. The tight string around his forehead felt like a cut and the nettles began to sting like blazes. He put his hand up to his head, felt the sticky wetness, looked at his hand, all red, let out an earpiercing screech, and started to run. That was forty years ago, but I believe he’d have been running yet, if he hadn’t bumped into some one on the road.
“Help! I’ve been scalped!’ he yelled.