The crowd slunk away, leaving the sheriff, the priest, and a doctor, who volunteered his services, to examine the bleeding flesh that had once been a tall and powerful red chieftain.
“The man is alive!” said the doctor with a tone of awe. “Life is not extinct. Bring me some water.”
“Save him—for the love of Christ!” exclaimed the priest as he dropped on his knees beside the torn and trampled red man. “It would be a miracle, a blessed miracle, if he should live. It is impossible!”
“His heart is beating—and I think it grows stronger,” repeated the doctor as he fell to work with deft energy.
“What is this?” asked the priest as he picked up a bloody and crumpled paper. He opened it and, as he finished reading it, he raised his eyes and prayed silently with a sort of breathless intensity, while the tears ran down his cheeks:
“Lord Jesus, grant me humbleness and patience with these people. Let my heart not harden with hate of this injustice.”
Then, looking at the poor bruised body of Howling Wolf, he said:
“O God, the pity of it! The pathos of it! His heart was good toward all men and they crushed him to earth!”
They took Howling Wolf up, the priest received him in his house and cared for him and he lived—but so battered, so misshapen that his own wife did not know him.
The cloud of his hate and despair never lifted. He spoke no word to any white man save to the good priest and to his friend, the agent, and when he died neither of them knew of it. No white man knows where his body was hidden away.