Then the arrows grew fewer. Just before they ceased I had fired at a tall native who had been conspicuous through the fight. He fell on his face. Nellie gave a shout, and loaded her own rifle on the chance of another shot, straining her bright and eager eyes to see if another lurking form was near enough for danger. Well for me was it that she did so! Staggering to his feet, a wounded native fitted an arrow to his bow, and sent it straight for my breast before I could raise my gun to my shoulder. Nellie made a snap shot at him, and, either from exhaustion or the effect of her bullet, he fell prone and motionless.
I felt a scratch on my arm—bare to the shoulder—as if a forest twig had raised the skin. "Look!" said Nellie, and her face changed. As she spoke, she passed her finger over the place, and showed it bloodstained. "The crawling brute's arrow hit you there. Let me suck the poison. If you don't"—as I made a gesture of dissent—"you die, twel' days."
"Don't be a fool!" said Hayston. "You're a dead man if you don't. As it is, you must run your chance. Some of these fellows will lose the number of their mess, I'm sorry to say."
So the girl, who had been but the moment before thirsting for blood, and firing into the mob of half-frightened, yet ferocious savages, pressed her soft lips on my arm, like a young mother soothing a babe, and with all womanly tenderness bound up the injured place, which had now begun to smart, and, to my excited imagination, commenced to throb from wrist to shoulder.
"Strange child, isn't she?" laughed Hayston. "If she'd only been born white, and been to boarding-school down east, what a sensation she'd have created in a ball-room!"
"Better as she is, perhaps," said I. "She has lived her life with few limitations, and enjoyed most of it."
The excited crew rushed in and finished every wounded man in a position to show fight. Nellie did not join in this, but stood leaning on her rifle—la belle sauvage, if ever there was one—brave, beautiful, with a new expression like that of a roused lioness on her parted lips and blazing eyes.
As for Hayston, he was a fatalist by constitution and theory. "A man must die when his time comes," he had often said to me. "Until the hour of fate he cannot die. Why, then, should he waste his emotions by giving way to the meanest of all attributes—personal fear?"
He had none, at any rate. He would have walked up to the block without haste or reluctance, had beheading been the fashionable mode of execution in his day, chaffed his executioner, and with a bow and a smile for the handsomest woman among the spectators, quitted with easy grace a world which had afforded him a fair share of its rarest possessions.
By his order the town was fired and quickly reduced to ashes, thus destroying a number of articles—mats, utensils, wearing apparel, weapons, etc.—which, requiring, as they do, considerable skill and expenditure of time, are regarded as valuable effects by all savages.