That slender strip of deer-skin, simple and harmless as it appeared, told a ghastly story of conflict and of death and of half-sated vengeance!
“We’ll git our hands on him yet,” the big hunter went on. “We’ve had chances to kill him of’en enough; but jest a common death ain’t enough fer him. He desarves more; an’ I want to give him his jest desarts. He must die an awful death! Our vengeance’ll overhaul him yet, ’Lon. Then you may tie a double knot! We’ll give him two varses to his eppytoph; eh, ’Lon?”
The dwarf nodded, touched the hilt of his hunting-knife significantly, and made motions as if to tie a knot in the string which he still held in his hand.
“Of whom do you speak?” queried Darke, as he supported himself on his elbow.
“The red fiend that led the attack on our cabin! The devil that shot my mother and carried my old father’s white scalp away in his belt! Hain’t we got reason plenty fer vengeance? Do ye wonder that we hunt, and kill Indians as you would kill serpints? Do ye think it’s strange that we don’t want to let that red imp die a common way?”
The big hunter had arisen while he spoke, drawing his Titanic form up to its full hight. The expression on his face was terrible to look upon. As he finished, he brought his ponderous clenched fist down, striking it in the horny palm of his other hand.
Drake half shuddered.
“No—no!” he cried. “No death—no torture on earth is horrible enough to be meet punishment for the atrocities of such a fiend incarnate! Is he an Indian chief?”
The giant nodded. His ungovernable rage seemed to have entirely spent itself, and he did not speak; but stood with folded arms and downcast eyes, his massive frame as motionless as though carved out of the solid rock around them.
Alonphilus seemed to partake keenly of this feeling of undying, inveterate hatred of the Indians. His face wore a hard, implacable look, and he kept drawing the record of their vengeance slowly through his fingers from one hand to the other, as if he longed to tie the short end of it that was yet unmarked by the little death register into one great hard knot, that could never be entangled, in commemoration of the passage from this life to the next of the murderer of his parents and the triumphant consummation of their terrible work of vengeance.