“Who brought you?”

“Some o’ yur own Injuns.”

“A prisoner?”

“That’s about the size o’ it. I shouldn’t have been one much longer.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, that to-morrow I’d have been as dead as a man could be, with forty or fifty fellows playing blue-blazes on his carcase.”

“Ha! they have decreed on burning you?”

“That’s it, lad, and consarn me if I ain’t glad to be out hyar in the open air a tellin’ it you, ’stead of in there a thinkin’ on it.”

“Who condemned you?”

“Wal, names hev a kind o’ slipped my memory, but they wur warriors and braves of yur enlightened community.”