His cry was echoed by that of another being—faint and rattling. As the lightning died away, he turned quickly toward the point from whence it proceeded. All was intensely dark: he could distinguish nothing.
Again the lightning cast a brilliant glow over the scene, and revealed to Lightfoot his peril. Only a few yards distant an Osage crouched low to the ground, a bent bow in his hands, the barbed shaft pointed full at his heart.
This much he saw, and then the glow died out. At the same moment a faint twang met his ear, and a burning pain seemed tearing deep to his very heart.
With an angry snarl he sprung forward, grappling with the Osage. It was an unresisting enemy. Not a quiver or a moan followed the knife-thrust. With the loosing of the arrow, the spirit of the Osage brave had fled to its happy hunting-grounds. True to his teaching, his last act was to deal the enemy a blow.
Lightfoot felt at his breast A few drops of blood stained his fingers, but the arrow was gone. He probed the wound—it was but a trifle. The strength of the dying brave had not equaled his determination.
The Kickapoo arose, and by the quick-following flashes of lightning carefully scrutinized the spot. To his joy he found nothing of Edith—because by that he knew that she still lived.
In the alternate gloom and brightness he glided around, stooping momentarily over each one of the dead savages. He was an Indian. He knew how to strike his living enemies sorest. On the morrow the Osage tribe would wail over their scalpless dead.
Standing erect, he flung back his head as though bidding defiance to the lightning's shaft, the thunder's bolt, as the long-pent-up storm broke in all its fury. The wild, thrilling scalp-cry of the Kickapoos resounded through the hills and forest—then the outcast chief turned and disappeared in the darkness.
And now the flashes came less frequent, the thunder-peals less heavy; the rain falls in torrents, as though eager to wipe out forever the evidences of crime and bloodshed that stained the earth's fair surface.
Believing himself the only survivor, and knowing that his only hope of escape with life was in speedy flight, Boone darted away through the forest, closely followed by united Osage and Pottawatomie braves. In that darkness, only relieved by the dazzling flashes of lightning that left all in even denser gloom than before, by force of contrast, flight was not only difficult but dangerous.