“But you do not think Bernard is dead?”
“I fear—nay, I hope he is. He will be at peace.”
Tom spoke not. He feared to say anything to confuse the dying woman. He tried even to control his feelings as he listened to the ayah’s terrible story of her slavery, and that of the poor boy, among the Indians. She spoke with difficulty, pausing often, sometimes even fainting away entirely. But Tom’s patience was rewarded at last.
The mutineers of the good ship Southern Hope had taken Bernard and the ayah into the interior, as far as Riobamba, and there they were both sold. The poor ayah would have been happy even then had they both been bought by the same master, or even by the same tribe. But this was not so; for, while Bernard was first taken to the Jivaro country, and sold thence to one of the wildest tribes of the far interior, she had remained all along with the Zaparo Indians. They had not been altogether unkind to her, though the lord and master who had claimed her made her drudge and toil at household duties, like the slaves that the wives of the Indians there ever are. She had to prepare and cook his food with her own hands, see to his arms and clothing, make and dye the very material of which his garments were composed, and, while wandering from place to place and sleeping in the woods, she had even at night to lie down in the place most open to the attacks of the jaguar or puma, or more likely to be traversed by some deadly snake. For all these toils and acts of kindness her reward was nothing save the bite and the blow. Finally she had fled, and after adventures innumerable she had found her boy. Though it was many years since he had seen her, and he had grown up into a tall skin-clad young savage, he knew his second mother, and gladly ran away with her. Both had been captured by the Zaparos, and brought to the very village from which the ayah had fled. Here she was condemned to die, and her “injured” lord and master was to be the executioner.
As she lay in her grass hut on the night before her intended execution she heard some movement near her, and next minute a tiny dagger was put into her hands. Then she knew that her would-be deliverer was Bernard. She could have cut the cords that bound her now, and once more sought safety in flight, but she would not leave her boy. Dead or alive she would be with him.
The morning came, and she was led out to die. The Indians were there in their thousands to see the grand spectacle of a foreign woman being massacred by their chief. She was led to the stake; for death by torture was her intended doom. Bernard was placed close to her that he might witness her sufferings.
And now her master approached with stern, set brow to begin the torture.
Suddenly with her own hand her cords were severed, and with a yell like that of a panther she sprang upon the chief, and cast him on the ground stabbed to the heart.
For a moment the tribe was silent, paralysed as it were, and the ayah herself broke the spell.
Advancing to where Bernard stood she cut the