For some moments the old man gazed sternly at his questioner as if he heard him not. Then the frown darkened, and, pointing to the grave at his feet, he said—
“The white man was more cruel.”
“What had he done?” asked the scout.
But the old man would not reply. There came over his withered features that stony stare of resolute contempt which he evidently intended to maintain to the last in spite of torture and death.
“Better question the child,” suggested Dick Darvall, who up to that moment had been too much horrified by what he had witnessed to be able to speak.
The scout looked at the child. She stood trembling beside her captor, with evidences of intense terror on her dusky countenance, for she was only too well accustomed to the cruelties practised by white men and red on each other to have any hope either for the old man or herself.
“Poor thing!” said Hunky Ben, laying his strong hand tenderly on the girl’s head. Then, taking her hand, he led her gently aside, and spoke to her in her own tongue.
There was something so unexpectedly soft in the scout’s voice, and so tender in his touch, that the little brown maid was irresistibly comforted. When one falls into the grasp of Goodness and Strength, relief of mind, more or less, is an inevitable result. David thought so when he said, “Let me fall now into the hand of the Lord.” The Indian child evidently thought so when she felt that Hunky Ben was strong and perceived that he was good.
“We will not hurt you, my little one,” said the scout, when he had reached a retired part of the copse, and, sitting down, placed the child on his knee. “The white man who was killed by your people was a very bad man. We were looking for him to kill him. Was it the old man that killed him?”
“No,” replied the child, “it was the chief.”