The men withdrew without replying. Although they wore the Indian dress, a panther skin drawn over their faces rendered them perfectly secure from detection. Only three persons remained on the top of the hill—Prairie-Flower, Margaret, and Natah Otann, who tried to break his bonds, while uttering hoarse and inarticulate sounds. The She-wolf surveyed her enemy, prostrated at her feet, with a joy impossible to describe, while Prairie-Flower, standing motionless by the Chief, gazed on him sorrowfully and thoughtfully.
"Yes," the She-wolf said, with a glance of satiated vengeance, "howl, panther; bend the bonds you cannot break. I hold you at last; it is my turn to torture you, to repay you all the suffering you lavished on me. Oh! I can never be sufficiently avenged on you, the assassin of my whole family. God is just: tooth for tooth, eye for eye, wretch!"
She picked up a dagger that had fallen on the ground near her, and began to prick him all over.
"Answer me—do you not feel the cold steel piercing your flesh?" she asked him. "Oh! I should like to make you suffer death a thousand times, were it possible."
A smile of contempt played over the Chief's lips. The She-wolf, exasperated, raised the dagger to strike him; but Prairie-Flower held her arm. Margaret turned like a tiger; but, recognizing the girl, she let the weapon fall from her trembling hand, and her face assumed an expression of infinite gentleness and tenderness.
"You here?" she exclaimed. "Then you did not forget the meeting I arranged with you? It is Heaven that sends you!"
"Yes," the young girl replied, "the Great Spirit sees all. My mother is good; Prairie-Flower loves her. Why thus torture the man who acted as father to the abandoned child? The Chief has ever been kind to Prairie-Flower; my mother will pardon him."
Margaret gazed at the girl with an expression of mad stupor; then her features were suddenly distorted, and she burst into a strident laugh.
"What!" she exclaimed, in a piercing voice, "you, Prairie-Flower, intercede for this man?"
"He was a father to Prairie-Flower," the girl answered, simply.