The Yellow Chief

by Mayne Reid

But neither actors nor spectators knew how soon this might be the termination of it.

So horrified were the captives, they could not calmly reflect; though, from the heartless revelry around them, instinct itself guided them to expect very little mercy.

The discrimination shown in their punishment led some to entertain a hope. All, both blacks and whites, now knew with whom they had to deal; for, in a whispered conversation among themselves, the story of Blue Dick was told to those of the emigrant party who had never heard of him before.

And the slaves who were not of the Blackadder plantation, as also the white men to whom these belonged, began to indulge in the belief that they were not to be made victims to the vengeance of the mulatto.

They were allowed time enough to reflect; for after some ten or a dozen of the female slaves had been douched, to the delight of the young Cheyennes, and the apparent satisfaction of their chief, there was an interlude in the atrocious performance. The renegade, as if contented with revenge—at least, for the time—had turned away from the waterfall, and gone inside his tent.

Among the three captive groups, there was none in which apprehension could be more keen than that composed of the white women. They had to fear for something dearer to them to life—their honour.

Several of them were young, and more than one good-looking. Not to know it they could not have been women.

Up to that hour the savages had not insulted them. But this gave them no assurance. They knew that these loved wine more than women; and the whisky taken from the despoiled wagons had hitherto diverted the savages from intruding upon them.

It could not long continue, for they had been told of something besides this. The character of cold incontinence given to the forest-Indian—he who figured in the early history of their country’s colonisation—has no application to the fiery Centaurs of the prairie. All they had ever heard of these savages led to this conclusion; and the white women, most of them wives, while thinking of danger to their husbands, were also apprehensive about their own.

She who had no husband, Clara Blackadder, suffered more than any of them. She had seen her father’s corpse lying upon the prairie sward, bathed in its own blood. She had just ceased to behold her brother subjected to a punishment she now knew to be fearfully painful; and she was reflecting what might be in store for herself.