“A good many will fall before they do master him,” thought Bart, “if he’s not captured already. I wonder whether they have hurt Juan and Sam.”
Just then the crowd about the post fell back, and the Doctor put his glass to his eye, and then uttered a cry of horror.
He glanced round directly to see if Maude had heard him, but she, poor girl, had fallen fast asleep in the niche where they had placed her, to be out of reach of bullets should firing begin.
“What is it, sir?” cried Bart. “Ah, I see. How horrible! The wretches! May I begin to shoot?”
“You could do no good, and so would only bring the foe down upon my child,” said the Doctor sternly.
“But it is Juan, is it not?” cried Bart, excitedly.
“Yes,” said the Doctor, using the glass, “and Sam. They have stripped the poor fellows almost entirely, and painted Death’s heads and cross-bones upon their hearts.”
“Oh yes,” cried Bart, in agony, “I can see;” and he looked with horror upon the scene, for there, evidently already half dead, their breasts scored with knives, and their ankles bound, Juan and Sam were suspended by means of a lariat, bound tightly to their wrists, and securely twisted round the upper part of the old blasted tree. The poor fellows’ hats and a portion of their clothes lay close by them, and as they hung there, inert and helpless, Bart, and his companion saw the cruel, vindictive Indians draw off to a short distance, and joining up into a close body, they began to fire at their prisoners, treating them as marks on which to try their skill with the rifle.
The sensation of horror this scene caused was indescribable, and Bart turned to the Doctor with a look of agony in his eyes.
“Quick!” he said; “let us run out and save them. Oh, what monsters! They cannot be men.”