The spectators, racing, crowding, following, took a crazed delight in beholding this gory head. Love, anger, joy, the daily emotions of man, were habitually so repressed by these serious people that now it seemed as if they reveled as in an orgie of shuddering and gasping, to give vent to their pent-up natures. They laughed, they skipped on nimble feet, they sang praises. The young men and women snatched the occasion, with its looseness of deportment, to look unbridled feelings into one another’s eyes.
The other attraction, in the rear, was a captive, a mere boy, as white as any in the multitude, and paler than the palest. Tall and lithe as he was, his age was scarcely a whit above fourteen. He was dressed as an Indian; he bore himself like a sullen brave. At his side was old Annawon, the last of King Philip’s councilors, who, having surrendered under a promise of “good quarter” was even now being led to his execution.
The interest centered, however, in the boy. Through the stoicism which he labored to hold as a mask upon his face, the signs of anguish played like an undercurrent. In all the throng he had but a single friend, the Red-man with whom he was marching. He looked about at the pitiless embankment of faces. Near him a score of nimble boys were running, a frantic desire to strike him depicted in their eyes. Further away a tall man was moving, perforce, with the tide. On his shoulder he bore a little Puritan maiden, who might have been crushed had he placed her on her feet. She was looking at the boy-captive with eyes that seemed a deeper brown for their very compassion. She clung to the man who held her, with a tense little fist. Her other tiny hand was pressed upon her cheek till all about each small finger was white, in the bonny apple-blush of her color. It seemed as if she must cry out to the young prisoner, in sympathy.
While the boy was gazing back his answer to the child—a quiver in consequence almost loosening his lip—an urchin near him abruptly cast a stone that struck him smartly in the side. With a panther-like motion the captive launched himself upon his assailant and bore him to earth in a second. The old councillor, Annawon, spoke some soft, quick word at which the lad in buckskin immediately abandoned his overthrown antagonist and regained his place in the march. His eyes blinked swiftly, but in vain, for tears, of anger and pain, forced their way between his lids and so to his cheeks, when he dashed them swiftly away on his sleeve.
The foot-soldiers scurried forward and closed in about their dangerous charge. The bawling youths of Plymouth seemed to multiply by magic. But their opportunities for committing further mischief were presently destroyed. The pageant was passing Plymouth jail. An officer hustled ten of his men about the boy-prisoner and wedged them through the press of people toward this place of gloom. Above the clamor then rose a voice, and in the Indian tongue the boy-captive heard the words:
“Farewell, Little-Standing-Panther.”
It was old Annawon, who had divined that there would be no other parting with the lad, who was the only creature which the war had left on earth for him to love.
The boy cried: “Farewell,” and the passage through the people closed behind him.
Those who looked beheld old Annawon smile faintly and sadly. It was the only expression which had played across his face since his surrender, and there was never another.
Through nearly every street the glad procession wound. At length, the head of the butchered King Philip was thrust upon an iron stake, which was planted deeply in the ground. Governor Winslow then requested that the people disperse to their several homes.