Here was vengeance for Oluski, had the chief only been alive to witness it.
Too weak to get away from the spot, Rody groaned in the bitterness of his spirit.
“Ten thousand times may I be accursed for all this! Fool—blind, infatuated fool—that I have been. Every aspiration might have been gratified, every hope fulfilled, had not my impatience blinded me against caution. May the fiend of darkness overtake these red—”
How long this tirade of blasphemous repentance of his villainy might have lasted it is impossible to say. It was stopped, however, by a physical pain, and with a faint voice, he cried—
“Water! water!”
Blood there was in plenty around him, but not one drop of water.
Others had yelled for it through the long, dreadful night, as agonisingly as he, but had been answered by the same solemn silence. They had died in their agony. Why should not he?
“Well, then, let death come! The full accumulation of mortal torment has fallen on myself; it cannot be greater?”
Wrong in this, as in everything else.
See! Skulking along the brow of the hill, stooping over and examining corpse after corpse, with a look of demoniac joy upon his hideous features, something in human shape, and yet scarce a man, appears.