Lord, Lord! What a battle! For all were filthy with blood, and there were brains and hair and guts sticking to knives and hatchets, and bodies and limbs all smeared. Good God! Was this war? And the green flies already whirling around us in the sunshine, and settling on the faces of the dead!—
The little maid of Askalege, leaning on her brother's shoulder, was coughing up water she had swallowed.
Nick, with a bloody sconce, but no worse damage, sat upon a rock and washed out his clotted hair.
"Hell!" quoth he, when he beheld me. "Here be I with a broken poll, and yonder goes the Indian who gave it me."
"Sit still, idiot!" said I, and set the ranger's whistle to my lips.
White and red, my men came running from their ferocious hunting. Not a man was missing, which was another lesson in war to me, for I thought always that death dealt hard with both sides, and I could not understand how so many guns could be fired with no corpse to mourn among us.
We had taken ten scalps; and, as only Johnny Silver among my white people fancied such trophies, my Oneidas skinned the noddles of our quarry, and, like all Indians, counted any scalp a glory, no matter whose knife or bullet dropped the game.
We all bore scratches, and some among us were stiff, so that the scratch might, perhaps, be called a wound. A bullet had barked de Golyer, another had burned Tahioni; Silver proudly wore a knife wound; the Screech-owl had been beaten and somewhat badly bitten. As for Nick, his head was cracked, and the little maid of Askalege still spewed water.
As for me, my throat was so swollen and bruised I could scarce speak or swallow.