“It was by my arrow that you lost your eye,” he said to one; “I scalped your father,” to another; and every taunt provoked counter-taunts accompanied with blows.
At length he looked at Snoqualmie,—a look so ghastly, so disfigured, that it was like something seen in a horrible dream.
“I took your sister prisoner last winter; you never knew,—you thought she had wandered from home and was lost in a storm. We put out her eyes, we tore out her tongue, and then we told her to go out in the snow and find food. Ah-h-h! you should have seen her tears as she went out into the storm, and––”
The sentence was never finished. While the last word lingered on his lips, his body sunk into a lifeless heap under a terrific blow, and Snoqualmie put back his blood-stained tomahawk into his belt.
“Shall we kill the other?” demanded the warriors, gathering around the surviving Bannock, who had been a stoical spectator of his companion’s sufferings. A ferocious clamor from the women and children hailed the suggestion of new torture; they thronged around the captive, the children struck him, the women abused him, spat upon him even, but not a muscle of his face quivered; he merely looked at them with stolid indifference.
“Kill him, kill him!” “Stretch him on red hot stones!” “We will make him cry!”
Snoqualmie hesitated. He wished to save this man for another purpose, and yet the Indian blood-thirst 100 was on him; chief and warrior alike were drunken with fury, mad with the lust of cruelty.
As he hesitated, a white man clad in the garb of an Indian hunter pushed his way through the crowd. Silence fell upon the throng; the clamor of the women, the fierce questioning of the warriors ceased. The personality of this man was so full of tenderness and sympathy, so strong and commanding, that it impressed the most savage nature. Amid the silence, he came and looked first at the dead body that yet hung motionless from the stake, then sorrowfully, reproachfully, at the circle of faces around. An expression half of sullen shame, half of defiance, crossed more than one countenance as his glance fell upon it.
“Friends,” said he, sadly, pointing at the dead, “is this your peace with the Bannocks,—the peace you prayed the Great Spirit to bless, the peace that was to last forever?”
“The Bannocks sent back the peace-pipe by this man, and he broke it and cast the pieces in our teeth,” answered one, stubbornly.