His tomahawk buried itself in the tree-trunk, within half an inch of the mark.
There was a baleful glow in Bear-Killer’s wolfish eyes as he poised his weapon, a treacherous glitter that the chief did not fail to notice. Just as the handle of the tomahawk was slipping out of his grasp, the chief dealt him a powerful blow on the side of the head. He staggered a moment and his body swayed to and fro as he tried to regain his balance on the very edge of the bank. The next instant his wild death-yell came up from below!
CHAPTER VIII.
THE GIANT’S STORY.
Darke noted the angry flash in the dwarf’s little black eyes, as he nodded an eager assent to his brother’s strange question, and wondered not a little what the “one great purpose” of this queerly assorted pair’s lives was; but he forbore to question the giant, not doubting that, if it was not some secret that they did not wish to disclose, he would explain himself in good time. And this belief was not far from correct, as the giant hunter’s next words attested. He sat down on a stool near at hand; and as Alonphilus came and stood at his side, he said:
“Yes; wer’e livin’ for some purpose. We have given our lives up to revenge! Wer’e a-gittin’ revenge every day, hain’t we, ’Lon?”
The dwarf’s round little pate was bent forward again until Darke just caught the glitter of the dusky eye under the broad rim of his slouch hat; and this he interpreted to be a token of assent to the giant’s question. As his face was raised to view again, he thought he saw the dwarf’s mute lips move, as if in an attempt to speak, and he imagined that volumes of vindictive, vengeful words were struggling for utterance. But the dumb tongue was incapable of expressing even a tithe of the dark passion that was written on every lineament of the pigmy’s face.
“And we’ve anuff to be revenged for, God knows!” Leander Maybob went on. “We can’t never wipe out of our memories our old father and mother that the red devils murdered in cool blood; we can’t never forgit the awful sight our eyes rested onto, when we came home from a hunt one morning; we can’t never wipe this out of our minds. But, the just God helpin’ us, we’ll wipe every one of their murderers off o’ the earth before we die! The devil that led them shall die a more horrible death than even his own hellish mind has planned for his poor helpless victims! We’ve done a deal t’ward fulfillin’ our vow in the past six years; eh, ’Lon? We’ve made many a savage bite the dust in that time!”
The dwarf’s hand darted into the bosom of his hairy vestment; it came out again in an instant, and he held up to Darke’s view a deer-skin string about four feet in length, which was knotted almost from one end to the other.
He touched each knot in succession with the forefinger of his right hand, accompanying every motion with a nod of the head.
“There’s just a hundred an’ forty-eight knots,” said the big hunter; “and every one on ’em is a red-skin’s eppytoph!”