“Israel, do your duty!”
Before the faces of the marching men had even shown surprise or questioning, each Mormon had turned and shot the man who walked beside him. The same instant brought piercing screams from the column of women ahead; for the signal had been given while they were in the lane of cedars where the Indian allies of the Saints had been ambushed. Shots and screams echoed and reëchoed across the narrow valley, and clouds of smoke, pearl gray in the morning sun, floated near the ground.
The plan of attack had been well laid for quick success. Most of the men had fallen at the first volley, either killed or wounded. Here and there along the all but prostrate line would be seen a struggling pair, or one of the emigrants running toward cover under a fire that always brought him low before he reached it.
On the women, too, the quick attack had been almost instantly successful. The first great volume of mad shrieks had quickly died low as if the victims were being smothered; and now could be heard only the single scream of some woman caught in flight,—short, despairing screams, and others that seemed to be cut short—strangled at their height.
Joel Rae found himself on the line after the first volley, drawn by some dread power he could not resist. Yet one look had been enough. He shut his eyes to the writhing forms, the jets of flame spitting through the fog of smoke, and turned to flee.
Then in an instant—how it had come about he never knew—he was struggling with a man who shouted his name and cursed him,—a dark man with blood streaming from a wound in his throat. He defended himself easily, feeling his assailant’s strength already waning. Time after time the man called him by name and cursed him, now in low tones, as they swayed. Then the Saint whose allotted victim this man had been, having reloaded his pistol, ran up, held it close to his head, fired, and ran back to the line.
He felt the man’s grasp of his shoulders relax, and his body grow suddenly limp, as if boneless. He let it down to the ground, looking at last full upon the face. At first glance it told him nothing. Then a faint sense of its familiarity pushed up through many old memories. Sometime, somewhere, he had known the face.
The dying man opened his eyes wide, not seeing, but convulsively, and then he felt himself enlightened by something in their dark colour,—something in the line of the brow under the black hair;—a face was brought back to him, the handsome face of the jaunty militia captain at Nauvoo, the man who had helped expel his people, who had patronised them with his airs of protector,—the man who had—
It did not come to him until that instant—this man was Girnway. In the flash of awful comprehension he dropped, a sickened and nerveless heap, beside the dead man, turning his head on the ground, and feeling for any sign of life at his heart.
Forward there, where the yells of the Indians had all but replaced the screams of frantic women—butchered already perhaps, subjected to he knew not what infamy at the hands of savage or Saint—was the yellow-haired, pink-faced girl he had loved and kept so long imaged in his heart; yet she might have escaped, she might still live—she might even not have been in the party.