Once more in the gorge, where the young Cheyenne chief and his band had encamped, before making attack upon the emigrant caravan.
It is the day succeeding that event, an hour before mid-day, with a bright sun shining down from a cloudless sky. The stage is the same, but somewhat changed the characters who figure upon it, having received an addition of more than double the number. The Indians are there; but even they do not seem the same. From the quiet earnest attitude of an expeditionary band, they have been transformed into a crowd of shouting savages.
Foxes before the quarry was run down, they are now ravening wolves.
Some are carousing, some lying on the grass in a state of helpless inebriety; while others, restrained by the authority of their chief, have kept sober, and stand guard over their new-made captives.
Only a few are needed for this duty. Three sentinels are deemed sufficient—one to each group; for the prisoners have been separated into three distinct parties—holding places apart from one another. The negroes, men, women, and children, driven into a compact ring, occupy an angular space between two projections of the cliff. There, huddled together, they have no thought of attempting to escape.
To them their new condition of captivity is not so very different from that to which they have been all their lives accustomed; and, beyond some apprehension of danger, they have not much to make them specially discontented. The Indian who stands beside them, with the butt of his long spear resting upon the turf, seems to know that his guard duty is a sinecure.
So also the sentinel who keeps watch over the white women—five in all, with about three times as many children—boys and girls of various degrees of age.
There is one among them, to whom none of these last can belong. She is old enough to be a wife; but the light airy form and virginal grace proclaim her still inexperienced in marriage, as in the cares of maternity. It is Clara Blackadder.
Seated alongside the others, though unlike them in most respects, she seems sad as any.
If she has no anxiety about the children around her, she has grief for those of older years—for a father, whom but a few hours before she had seen lying dead upon the prairie turf, and whose grey hairs, besprinkled with blood, are still before her eyes.