“Wretch”! he shrieked at Quinnemongh, “must I kill you a second time to make you expiate your sin at marrying Liddenah”?
Quinnemongh, who stood rigid as a statue at the far side of the ford, replied, “You have not killed me once; how dare you speak of a second time”?
“Whose scalp have I then”? shouted In-nan-ga-eh, as he continued to rush forward.
“Not mine surely”, said Quinnemongh, as he felt his comparatively sparse locks.
Just as the men came face to face it dawned on both what had happened, and with gleaming knives, they sprang at one another in a death struggle. For half an hour they fought, grappling and stabbing, kicking and biting, in the shallow waters of the ford. Neither would go down, though Liddenah’s scalp was forced from In-nan-ga-eh’s[In-nan-ga-eh’s] hand, and got between the breasts of the two combatants, who pushed it, greasy and gory, up and down as they fought. They literally stabbed one another full of holes, and bit and tore at their faces like wild beasts; they carved the skin off their shoulders and backs, they kicked until their shin bones cracked, until finally both, worn out from loss of blood, sank into the brook and died.
In the morning the scalped and mutilated form of Liddenah was discovered among the gaudy blankets and decorated buffalo robes; a bloody trail was followed to the stepping stones, where the two gruesome corpses were found, half submerged in the red, bloody water, in an embrace so inextricable, their arms like locked battling stags’ antlers that they could not in the rigidity of death be separated. Foes though they were, the just and patient Indians who found them could do nothing else but dig a common grave in the half-frozen earth, close to the stepping stones, and there they buried them together, with Liddenah’s soggy scalp and their bent and broken knives, their bodies to commingle[commingle] with earth until eternity.
VIII
Black Chief’s Daughter
It was the occasion of the annual Strawberry Dance at the Seneca Reservation, a lovely evening in June, when, after a warm rain, there had been a clear sunset, and the air was sweet with the odor of the grass, and the narrow roads were deep with soft, brown mud and many puddles of water.
In the long, grey frame Council House all was animation and excitement. The grim old Chief, Twenty Canoes, decked out in his headdress of feathers, followed by the musicians with wolf-skin drums filled with pebbles had arrived, and taken places on the long bench that ran almost the entire length of the great hall. Other older and distinguished Indians, Indian guests from the Cornplanter Reservation in Pennsylvania, and from the New York Reservations at Tonawanda, and the Geneseo, and a few white visitors, including the Rev. Holt, the Town Missionary and Attorney Vreeland, the agent, with their families, completely filled the lengthy bench.