Many there were, however, who, schooled to scenes as dreadful, acquitted themselves like warriors. Snatching their weapons from the greedy flames, they sprang with irresistible fury upon the bristling files of pikemen. Their heavy war-clubs beat down and splintered the fragile spears of the Europeans, whose corslets, ruddy with the reflected fires amid which they fought, glinted back still brighter sparks from the hatchets of flint which crashed against them. The fierce veterans pealed the charging cry of many a well-fought field in other climes; but wild and high, the Indian war-whoop rose shrill above the din of conflict, until the hovering raven in mid air caught up and answered that discordant shriek.
De Grais, in the meantime, surveyed the scene of action with eager intentness, expecting each moment to see the paler features of the Christian captive among the dusky females, who ever and anon sprang shrieking from the blazing lodges, and were instantly hurled backward into the flames by fathers and brothers, who even thus would save them from the hands that vainly essayed to grasp their distracted forms. The Mohawks began now to wage a more successful resistance, and just when the fight was raging hottest, and the high-spirited Frenchman, beginning to despair of his prey, was about launching into the midst of it, he saw a tall warrior who had hitherto been forward in the conflict, disengage himself from the melee, and wheeling suddenly upon a soldier, who had likewise separated from his party, brain him with a tomahawk before he could make a movement in his defense. The quick eye of the young chevalier, too, caught a glance of another figure, in pursuit of whom, as she emerged with an infant in her arms, from a lodge on the further side of the village, the luckless Frenchman had met his doom. It was the Christian captive, the wife of Kiodago, beneath whose hand he had fallen. The chief now stood over the body of his victim, brandishing a war-club which he had snatched from a dying Indian near. Quick as thought, De Grais leveled a pistol at his head, when the track of the flying girl brought her directly in his line of sight, and he withheld his fire. Kiodago, in the meantime, had been cut off from the rest of his people by the soldiers, who closed in upon the space which his terrible arm had a moment before kept open. A cry of agony escaped the high-souled savage, as he saw how thus the last hope was lost. He made a gesture as if about to again rush into the fray, and sacrifice his life with his tribesmen; and then perceiving how futile must be the act, he turned on his heel, and bounded after his retreating wife, with arms outstretched to shield her from the dropping shots of the enemy.
The rising sun had now lighted up the scene, but all this passed so instantaneously that it was impossible for De Grais to keep his eye upon the fugitives amid the shifting forms that glanced continually before him; and when, accompanied by Hanyost and seven others, he had got fairly in pursuit, Kiodago, who still kept behind his wife, was far in advance of the chevalier and his party. Her forest training had made the Christian captive as fleet of foot as an Indian maiden. She heard, too, the cheering voice of her loved warrior behind her, and pressing her infant to her heart, she urged her flight over crag and fell and soon reached the head of a rocky pass, which it would take some moments for any but an American forester to scale. But the indefatigable Frenchmen are urging their way up the steep; the cry of pursuit grows nearer as they catch a sight of her husband through the thickets, and the agonized wife finds her onward progress prevented by a ledge of rock that impends above her. But now again Kiodago is by her side; he has lifted his wife to the cliff above, and placed her infant in her arms and already the Indian mother is speeding on to a cavern among the hills, well known as a fastness of safety.
Kiodago looked a moment after her retreating figure, and then coolly swung himself to the ledge which commanded the pass. He might now easily escape his pursuers; but as he stepped back from the edge of the cliff and looked down the narrow ravine, the vengeful spirit of the red man was too strong within him to allow such an opportunity of striking a blow to escape. His tomahawk and war-club had both been lost in the strife, but he still carried at his back a more efficient weapon in the hands of so keen a hunter. There were but three arrows in his quiver, and the Mohawk was determined to have the life of an enemy in exchange for each of them. His bow was strung quickly, but with as much coolness as if there was no exigency to require haste. Yet he had scarcely time to throw himself upon his breast, a few yards from the brink of the declivity, before one of his pursuers, more active than the rest, exposed himself to the unerring archer. He came leaping from rock to rock, and had nearly reached the head of the glen, when, pierced through and through by one of Kiodago's arrows, he toppled from the crags, and rolled, clutching the leaves in his death agony, among the tangled furze below. A second met a similar fate, and a third victim would probably have been added, if a shot from the fusil of Hanyost, who sprang forward and caught sight of the Indian just as the first man fell, had not disabled the thumb joint of the bold archer, even as he fixed his last arrow in the string. Resistance seemed now at an end, and Kiodago again betook himself to flight. Yet anxious to divert the pursuit from his wife, the young chieftain pealed a yell of defiance, as he retreated in a different direction from that which she had taken. The whoop was answered by a simultaneous shout and rush on the part of the whites; but the Indian had not advanced far before he perceived that the pursuing party, now reduced to six, had divided, and that three only followed him. He had recognized the scout, Hanyost, among his enemies, and it was now apparent that that wily traitor, instead of being misled by his ruse, had guided the other three upon the direct trail to the cavern which the Christian captive had taken. Quick as thought, the Mohawk acted upon the impression. Making a few steps within a thicket, still to mislead his present pursuers, he bounded across a mountain torrent, and then leaving his foot-marks dashed in the yielding bank, he turned shortly on a rock beyond, recrossed the stream, and concealed himself behind a falling tree; while his pursuers passed within a few paces of his covert.
A broken hillock now only divided the chief from the point to which he had directed his wife by another route, and to which the remaining party, consisting of De Grais, Hanyost and a French musketeer, were hotly urging their way. The hunted warrior ground his teeth with rage when he heard the voice of the treacherous Fleming in the glen below him; and springing from crag to crag, he circled the rocky knoll, and planted his foot by the roots of a blasted oak, that shot its limbs above the cavern, just as his wife had reached the spot, and pressing her babe to her bosom, sank exhausted among the flowers that waved in the moist breath of the cave. It chanced that at that very instant, De Grais and his followers had paused beneath the opposite side of the knoll, from whose broken surface the foot of the flying Indian had disengaged a stone, which crackling among the branches, found its way through a slight ravine into the glen below. The two Frenchmen stood in doubt for a moment. The musketeer, pointing in the direction whence the stone had rolled, turned to receive the order of his officer. The chevalier, who had made one step in advance of a broad rock between them, leaned upon it, pistol in hand, half turning toward his follower while the scout, who stood furthest out from the steep bank, bending forward to discover the mouth of the cave, must have caught a glimpse of the sinking female, just as the shadowy form of her husband was displayed above her. God help thee now, bold archer! thy quiver is empty; thy game of life is nearly up; the sleuth-hound is upon thee; and thy scalp-lock, whose plumes now flutter in the breeze, will soon be twined in the fingers of the vengeful renegade. Thy wife—But hold! the noble savage has still one arrow left!
Disabled, as he thought himself, the Mohawk had not dropped his bow in his flight. His last arrow was still gripped in his bleeding fingers; and though his stiffening thumb forbore the use of it to the best advantage, the hand of Kiodago had not lost its power. {FN} The crisis which it takes so long to describe had been realized by him in an instant. He saw how the French-men, inexperienced in woodcraft, were at fault; he saw, too, that the keen eye of Hanyost had caught sight of the object of their pursuit, and that further flight was hopeless, while the scene of his burning village in the distance inflamed him with hate and fury toward the instrument of his misfortunes. Bracing one knee upon the flinty rock, while the muscles of the other swelled as if the whole energies of his body were collected in that single effort, Kiodago aims at the treacherous scout, and the twanging bowstring dismisses his last arrow upon its errand. The hand of the Spirit could alone have guided that shaft! But Waneyo smiles upon the brave warrior, and the arrow, while it rattles harmless against the cuirass of the French officer, glances toward the victim for whom it was intended, and quivers in the heart of Hanyost! The dying wretch grasped the sword-chain of the chevalier, whose corslet clanged among the rocks, as the two went rolling down the glen together; and De Grais was not unwilling to abandon the pursuit when the musketeer, coming to his assistance, had disengaged him, bruised and bloody, from the embrace of the stiffening corpse.
{FN} The English mode of holding the arrow, as represented in the plate, is not common among our aborigines, who use the thumb for a purchase.
What more is there to add. The bewildered Europeans rejoined their comrades, who were soon after on their march from the scene they had desolated; while Kiodago descended from his eyrie to collect the fugitive survivors of his band, and, after burying the slain, to wreak a terrible vengeance upon their murderers; the most of whom were cut off by him before they joined the main body of the French army. The Count de Frontenac, returning to Canada, died soon afterward, and the existence of his half-blood daughter was soon forgotten. And—though among the dozen old families in the State of New York who have Indian blood in their veins, many trace their descent from the off spring of the noble Kiodago and his Christian wife—yet the hand of genius, as displayed in the admirable picture of Chapman, which we reproduce, has alone rescued from oblivion the thrilling scene of the Mohawk's LAST ARROW!