He paid no attention to my greeting, although the canoe continued its approach until it grounded against the bank. I slipped down to the water to urge him to come ashore and take cover. He was a well-known chief, and for years very friendly to the whites. The thing he held in his mouth was a piece of journey-cake, only he was not eating it as I had first supposed. As I gained the canoe I noticed a paddle placed across it so as to support his back, and another so braced as to prop up his head.
The man was dead. There was a hideous wound at the back of his head. He had been struck down with an ax. While I was weighing this gruesome discovery the scream of the panther rang out again and close by, and the bushes parted and I wheeled in time to strike up a double-barrel rifle a young man was aiming at the chief.
“You’ve fired at him twice already, Shelby Cousin,” I angrily rebuked. “Isn’t that about enough?”
“Nothin’ ain’t ’nough till I git his sculp,” was the grim reply; and Cousin, scarcely more than a boy, endeavored to knock my rifle aside. “At least you ought to kill before you scalp,” I said.
His lips parted and his eyes screwed up into a perplexed frown and he dropped the butt of his rifle to the ground. Holding the barrels with both hands, he stared down at the dead man.
“Some one bu’sted him with a’ ax most vastly,” he muttered. “An’ me wastin’ two shoots o’ powder on the skunk!”
“Without bothering to notice the turkey-buzzards that have been following him down the river,” I said.
He looked sheepish and defended himself:
“The cover was too thick to see anything overhead.”
“He was a friend to the whites. He has been murdered. His killer struck him down from behind. As if murder wasn’t bad enough, his killer tried to make a joke of it by stuffing journey-cake in his mouth. The cake alone would tell every red who sees him that a white man killed him.”