"Yet he said that he did so," I replied with a sob, "because they must die."
"Ay, mistress," answered Buck, "so they must. All men must die. But they're not a-going to die yet, and he knew it. But I'll tell you who is going to die, and that before long. That's Roderick, the medicine man. He's marked as much as any man ever was when the dead warrant came down to Newgate. Ay! and a good deal more, too, for mine came down once and yet here I am alive and well, while the old judge who tried and sentenced me has gone long ago, I make no doubt."
"What will they do to him?" Mary asked.
"Do? Do, mistress? Why convict him of being an impostor, and then--why, then they'll tear him all to pieces. That's what they'll do with him. And when they've finished with him there won't be as much left of Roderick as will make a meal for a crow. I've spoken with men who have been captured by the Indians and lived to escape from them, and awful tales I've heard of their tortures, but the worst tortures they ever devised were kept for those whom the Indians have trusted and been deceived by. And you had only got to look at this chief's face when you, missy, were denouncing him, to guess what's going to happen to the other."
As he spoke we did, indeed, remember the look on Anuza's face as he stood behind the window frame. Also, I remembered the strange glance he gave me when he said that Gerald and O'Rourke should live though they must die later. So that it verily seemed as if Buck had rightly interpreted all that was going on in our captor's mind.
We halted that night on the skirts of a forest with, to the west of it, a spur of the Alleghany Mountains. The scene itself was picturesque and beautiful, while, to our minds, it had something of the awful and sublime in connection with it. For here it was that, although not more than forty English miles from where I had dwelt all my life, the limit to what we knew of the mysterious unknown land lying to the west of us ceased. Into those mountains, indeed, the rough backwoodsman had penetrated sometimes, bringing back stories of the bands of savages who dwelt within them; we knew that living with these bands were white men and women who, as children, had been torn from their homes and parents in raids and forays, but we knew little more. And for what lay beyond the mountains still farther to the west we knew nothing except that, thousands of miles away, there was another ocean which washed the western shores of the great land in which we dwelt, and that on the coast of that ocean were Spanish settlements, even as on our coasts there were English settlements. But, of all that lay between the two when once the mountains were passed, no man knew anything.
And now it was that into those mountains we were to be taken, those mountains to which Roderick St. Amande had fled from my father's house, and where, to the Indian dwellers within them, he had appeared as a great magician or sorcerer.
The halt for the night was made, as I have said, on the skirts of the forest, with cool grass beneath the trees and, above us, those great trees stretching out their branches so that they were all interlaced together and formed a canopy which would have kept the rain from us had it been the wet instead of the exceeding dry season, and with, sheltering in those branches, innumerable birds twittering and calling to each other. It was, indeed, a strange scene! Around us in a vast circle sat the Indians, speaking never at all to each other, but smoking silently from the pipes they passed from one to the other, their faces still with the war-paint upon them and their bodies, now that the night was coming, wrapped in their blankets. Inside that circle we, the prisoners, were huddled together, Mary being at this time asleep with her head on her lover's shoulder and I lying with mine upon her lap, while the men, now no longer my servants, or, at least, my slaves, talked in whispers to each other.
And near us, in the glade, there stood that which we in our poor hearts regarded as an omen of better things to come. An object which, at least, went far to cheer us up and to inspire us with the earnest hope that, even between us and those in whose hands we were, there might still be a possibility of peace and of mercy from the victor to the vanquished. This thing was a rude stone in the form of a monolith, made smooth on one side and with, upon that smoothness, these words carved: "It was to this spot, in ye yere 1678, that Henry Johnson was brought from the mountains by an Indian woman, he being a boy of ten, and set free to return to Jamestown because, as she said to him, 'she pitied his poor mother.' 'I cried unto Thee in my trouble and Thou heard'st my prayer.'"[[4]]
Seeing this stone before us growing whiter in the dusk as the night came on, we, too, in our hearts cried unto the Lord and besought Him to hear our prayers and to give us freedom from our enemies and all dangers that encompassed us about.