"The slayer has been here before us," he exclaimed,—"the man is dead and scalped already!"
With these words he advanced to the tree, and the others following, they beheld with horror the body of a savage, of vast and noble proportions, lying on its face across the roots of the tree, and glued, it might almost be said, to the earth by a mass of coagulated blood, that had issued from the scalp and axe-cloven skull. The fragments of a rifle shattered, as it seemed, by a violent blow against the tree under which he Jay, were scattered at his side, with a broken powder-horn, a splintered knife, the helve of a tomahawk, and other equipments of a warrior, all in like manner shivered to pieces by the unknown assassin. The warrior seemed to have perished only after a fearful struggle; the earth was torn where he lay, and his hands, yet grasping the soil, were dyed a double red in the blood of his antagonist, or perhaps in his own.
While Roland gazed upon the spectacle, amazed, and wondering in what manner the wretched being had met his death, which must have happened very recently, and whilst his party was within the sound of a rifle-shot, he observed a shudder to creep over the apparently lifeless frame; the fingers relaxed their grasp of the earth, and then clutched it again with violence; a broken, strangling rattle came from the throat; and a spasm of convulsion seizing upon every limb, it was suddenly raised a little upon one arm, so as to display the countenance, covered with blood, the eyes retroverted into their orbits, and glaring with the sightless whites. It was a horrible spectacle,—the last convulsion of many that had shaken the wretched and insensible, yet still suffering clay, since it had received the death-stroke. The spasm was the last, and but momentary; yet it sufficed to raise the body of the mangled barbarian, so far that, when the pang that excited it suddenly ceased, and, with it, the life of the sufferer, the body rolled over on the back, and thus lay, exposing to the eyes of the lookers-on two gashes, wide and gory, on the breast, traced by a sharp knife and a powerful hand, and, as it seemed, in the mere wantonness of a malice and lust of blood which even death could not satisfy. The sight of these gashes answered the question Roland had asked of his own imagination; they were in the form of a cross; and as the legend, so long derided, of the forest-fiend recurred to his memory, he responded, almost with a feeling of superstitious awe, to the trembling cry of Telie Doe:—
"It is the Jibbenainosay!" she exclaimed, staring upon the corse with mingled horror and wonder:—"Nick of the Woods is up again in the forest!"
CHAPTER XI.
There was little really superstitious in the temper of Captain Forrester; and however his mind might be at first stirred by the discovery of a victim of the redoubted fiend so devoutly believed in by his host of the preceding evening, it is certain that his credulity was not so much excited as his surprise. He sprang from his horse and examined the body, but looked in vain for the mark of the bullet that had robbed it of life. No gun-shot wound, at least none of importance, appeared in any part. There was, indeed, a bullet-hole in the left shoulder, and, as it seemed, very recently inflicted: but it was bound up with leaves and vulnerary herbs, in the usual Indian way, showing that it must have been received at some period anterior to the attack which had robbed the warrior of life. The gashes across the ribs were the only other wounds on the body; that on the head, made by a hatchet, was evidently the one that had caused the warrior's death.
If this circumstance abated the wonder the soldier had at first felt on the score of a man being killed at so short a distance from his own party, without any one hearing the shot, he was still more at a loss to know how one of the dead man's race, proverbial for wariness and vigilance, should have been approached by any merely human enemy so nigh as to render fire-arms unnecessary to his destruction. But that a human enemy had effected the slaughter, inexplicable as it seemed, he had no doubt; and he began straightway to search among the leaves strewn over the ground, for the marks of his foot-steps; not questioning that, if he could find and follow them for a little distance, he should discover the author of the deed, and, which was of more moment to himself, a friend and guide to conduct his party from the forest.
His search was, however, fruitless; for, whether it was that the shadows of the evening lay too dark on the ground, or that eyes more accustomed than his own to such duties were required to detect a trail among dried forest leaves, it was certain that he failed to discover a single foot-step, or other vestige of the slayer. Nor were Pardon Dodge and Emperor, whom he summoned to his assistance, a whit more successful; a circumstance, however, that rather proved their inexperience than the supernatural character of the Jibbenainosay, whose foot-prints, as it appeared, were not more difficult to find than those of the dead Indian, for which they sought equally in vain.
While they were thus fruitlessly engaged, an exclamation from Telie Doe drew their attention to a spectacle, suddenly observed, which, to her awe-struck eyes, presented the appearance of the very being, so truculent yet supernatural, whose traces, it seemed, were to be discovered only on the breasts of his lifeless victims; and Roland, looking up, beheld with surprise, perhaps even for a moment with the stronger feeling of awe, a figure stalking through the woods at a distance, looking as tall and gigantic in the growing twilight, as the airy demon of the Brocken, or the equally colossal spectres seen on the wild summits of the Peruvian Andes. Distance and the darkness together rendered the vision indistinct; but Roland could see that the form was human, that it moved onwards with rapid strides, and with its countenance bent upon the earth, or upon another moving object, dusky and of lesser size, that rolled before it, guiding the way, like the bowl of the dervise in the Arabian story; and, finally, that it held in its hands, as if on the watch for an enemy, an implement wondrously like the fire-lock of a human fighting-man. At first, it appeared as if the figure was approaching the party, and that in a direct line; but presently Roland perceived it was gradually bending its course away to the left, its eyes still so closely fixed on its dusky guide,—the very bear, as Roland supposed, which was said so often to direct the steps of the Jibbenainosay,—that it seemed as if about to pass the party entirely without observation.
But this it made no part of the young soldier's resolutions to permit; and, accordingly, he sprang upon his horse, determined to ride forwards and bring the apparition to a stand, while it was yet at a distance.